


I'm Not Quite Sure How We Got Here

by StoriesFromDust



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Anal, Blowjobs, Gavin is a Mess, Light Bondage, M/M, Nines is soft, Premature Ejaculation, Shower Sex, They are both soft, car-sex, dumbasses flirting, established FWB with the relationship happening by mistake, every day this feels more like a crack fic but it aint, hankcon implied, hard fucking after, heheheheh, i am a mess too, i didnt mean to fall in love with these stupid boys, im gonna subvert that angst train wherever I can, misuse of the Keurig brand, morning after sex, no beta we die like men, not really established relationship, soft fluff first, somehow they got softer in chapter 2, uh... mild cuckolding... I think? I have no idea how to tag chapter 4, we just havin a good time over here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2019-07-28 06:03:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16235660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StoriesFromDust/pseuds/StoriesFromDust
Summary: Eventually this was going to be a problem. Eventually Nines would want some sort of indication that Gavin had either enjoyed himself, which he had, or was too confused to manage what was going on, which he was, or regretted everything, which he didn't. And, no matter how many dark jokes Gavin made at Nines about him being plastic or a robot or an object, neither of them thought that it was true and neither of them thought the other thought that it was true so they were going to have to talk about it.--Get u a man who can come coffee and mood elevators and then fucking kill you.This fic is for me to crack jokes and write some fun FWB porno for these terrible idiots.





	1. This kind of a person

**Author's Note:**

> I am working on another d:bh fic right now at the same time but that one is Hankcon and sadder with more feelings. I wanted to do one that was more fun and playful. This Nines is the same Nines from my completed HankCon Fic 'How to be Authentic' but you don't need to read that for this to make sense. I'm not entirely sure that this Gavin Reed is the same Gavin from that fic, because I made him pretty shitty in that one and I kind of just want to start with a 'nicer' Gavin. He's still an asshole though. Anyway, enjoy!

Gavin wasn't entirely sure when he had slipped from being asleep to being awake. At some point he became aware of his existence measured by the lack of irritants. It was early, so the light from his window wasn't hitting him in the face, and was just streaming in to warm the bedspread and attract two of his cats into the spot to bask and loaf respectively. His alarm was not going off and it certainly wasn't going off at the exact inopportune time to leave him over-tired or overslept. 

He was being held. Someone had their palm flat against his abdomen, spread from waist up to where a thumb was gently tracing an arch over the bottom of his ribs. The entire rest of the person was pressed into his back. Gavin had never enjoyed being held like this, but the usual irritants were not there. He normally hated the way breath felt against his skin, but there was none. He was neither too warm nor too cold from minor mis-matches in metabolism. He normally hated how the accumulated sweat of two people sleeping made him sticky, but there wasn't any. Normally his partners were put off by his insistence that they have at least a sheet separating them in full. 

If he was awake he was going to have to acknowledge that he had slept with an android and that was a problem. So he pretended to be asleep instead. Do androids sleep? The thumb running gently over his ribs indicated not. Was he being obviously pathetic, heart-rate monitored, clearly awake and faking? He wasn't sure, and in any case, he wasn't being called out, so he continued to pretend. 

Nines' hand was shockingly gentle. Once he had seen this particular hand punch clean through the door of a car, rip it off the hinges, and grab the frame to pull himself in said car and stomp on the brakes so their suspect did not escape. Gavin went to the gym four times a week but was certainly not deluded about his physical capacity. He was more fragile than a car. Nines could tear him clean in half if he wanted to. He could feel the bruise on his hip from last night when he had begged Nines to do exactly that and he was quite happy that androids definitively understood what hyperbole was, sci-fi cliches be damned.

Eventually this was going to be a problem. Eventually Nines would want some sort of indication that Gavin had either enjoyed himself, which he had, or was too confused to manage what was going on, which he was, or regretted everything, which he didn't. And, no matter how many dark jokes Gavin made at Nines about him being plastic or a robot or an object, neither of them thought that it was true and neither of them thought the other thought that it was true so they were going to have to talk about it. 

Gavin didn't want to talk about it. 

Android issues aside, there were other problems. Gavin hadn't been in a relationship for a long time, and in the interim between his last big, world rending breakup and now he hadn't had many casual hookups either. Certainly none of them ended with the other party pressed against his back with just their very large palm holding him close. 

And it couldn't possibly be  _ just  _ a hookup because they worked together. Not just worked together in the sense that they had to see one another as they walked into the building but they  _ worked together, _ they spent all day together on cases. When Gavin fucked this up, and he would, there would be fallout at the office and then it would be public and there was nothing Gavin wanted less than public acknowledgement that he was a human person with a private life.

_ Ah _ , his stupid brain went,  _ remember how androids make you uncomfortable? This seems like something relevant to that. _

Shut up brain.

The android thing would be an issue. It didn't seem like his initial fears were being realized. It didn't seem like he was being replaced. In truth, the one who had been replaced was Connor. Nines had taken the spot that Connor was going to be assigned to. It made Gavin relaxed when the first thing to become defunct was a machine.

He probably shouldn't think like that with an android pressed against him so perfectly. But he was asleep right now so his thoughts didn't count.

Gavin had seen this on the horizon for years. (The android takeover, not the android spooning.) Even when he was a kid kiosks were taking over for waitstaff and automation was taking over for factory jobs in his father's time. He'd tried to get ahead of the curve, like his brother had, by studying programming. But his stupid brother Elijah changed the curve altogether. The first AI's had been very task driven, mostly just programming themselves to be able to program themselves better. Elijah made a little perpetual motion machine so he could sit back and be a weird creep and rake in the cash. Gavin had tried to find a job that would stay out of the way of machine learning, something that needed intuition, something he assumed a machine couldn't have. 

It was useful to have a CS degree as a police officer, it had been a long time since crimes were predominantly about running across rooftops or whatever it was that old guys like Lt. Anderson got promoted for. Gavin had written a whole host of code for the department that tracked human behavior online, modern drug deals, identity theft, human trafficking. Anything he could study, he could automate. 

And he had no say in the matter when Elijah's company had requested copies of the code that he was sure was going to land him a promotion. It was all owned by the department. If there was one difference between Gavin and Elijah, it was that Gavin gave up his intellectual property too fast. Elijah was always self-assured enough to hoard his creations and wait to show them off until he could be on top. Gavin wanted praise and a promotion. He wanted someone else to tell him he did good, a true product of the american education system. But he didn't get that promotion and instead androids started invading his little island of intuition-based job security. 

So he lay in bed, warm and worried about which parts of his own fucking code had been used to create the android he was pretending to be asleep for. Nines might not be angling to replace him, current circumstances indicated not, but he was on track for that promotion and there would be some real emotional fallout from that.

This was kind of a mess.

_ Just pretend to be asleep, eventually I will die of dehydration and then I don't have to deal with any of this. _ It seemed like a solid plan.

Nines' thumb stopped at the nadir of it's gentle trail, and Gavin panicked.  _ Busted busted busted. _

Gavin's phone started to ring.

_ Fuck fuck fuck. _

Before his phone could even get a full note into his ringtone Nines had leaned forward to Gavin's phone on the nightstand and pressed a button on the side to mute it. 

His palm returned to Gavin's abdomen.

Could he still get away with it? He couldn't be too still. Gavin stretched out, maybe he was a deep sleeper? Nines couldn't know. He could do that little stretch and mumble thing that was very cliche and still fake being asleep, maybe even actually fall back asleep.

His phone rang again.

"Fuck whoever that is. I  _ will  _ kill them." Nines muttered into Gavin's hair and Gavin accidentally laughed.

Aw shit.

"Sorry if I woke you." Nines whispered.

So he had been successfully pretending for a while at least. Somehow that eased Gavin's mind a little. Nines wasn't omniscient. Ok. Maybe this was manageable. 

The phone rang again, in what Gavin now could recognize as his text alert, and Nines took Gavin's phone, pressing it into his palm. "Please tell them to fuck off."

It was Tina. 

_ 'Wyd ;)' _

_ 'My wife ditched me to hang with her stupid family that she loves or whatever, im gonna divorce her :P' _

_ 'Wanna get fancy coffees and gossip' _

Ah. New problem. He wasn't going to be able to not tell Tina. This was in fact, primo gossip and Gavin had never once been the kind of person to value his own self interest over good rumors to spread. Nines actually might not be able to keep it from Tina either. The three of them were a little bitchy. Particularly about one another.

"Don't tell her I'm here." Nines whispered conspiratorialy, right into Gavin's ear. Jesus. A thrill ran up his spine.

Gavin was very aware that he hadn't said anything yet, and he didn't feel like he was in full control of his voice right then. Nines had said quite a few things so far. Gavin was making it weird. He should say something, to Nines or to Tina. His thumbs hovered over the keyboard but didn't do anything.

He waited way too long to respond to either of them. Once it was clear it had gotten weird Nines plucked the phone from Gavin's hands and set it on the pillow. He pressed his palm back to Gavin's stomach. 

Nines spoke into Gavin's hair quietly, "Before you say anything, in 1994 philosopher  Nick Bostrom proposed that the odds of us living in a simulation are far,  _ far  _ greater than the odds of this being the original 'real world'. So, you don't have to freak out about this since you're just as likely to be an AI as I am. Would you like to get breakfast?"

"Yea."

Nines kissed the back of his neck right at his hairline before moving his palm from Gavin's stomach to the bed and pushing himself up. Gavin risked a glance back. His stomach dropped.

"Where's your phucking arm?"

Which was a stupid question because he could see Nines' arm on the far side of the bed, detached.

Nines picked it up and snapped it right back on like nothing. "I wasn't able to find a comfortable position with my arm attached. It was either in between us which was unacceptable or it was below you which I didn't think would be comfortable for you or it was below me which I did not care for. So I corrected an obvious design flaw in your species. I am an innovator." Nines said, voice dripping with sarcastic narcissism. "You were comfortable." he assured Gavin and then smirked, "You're welcome."

Gavin scoffed and gave him the finger. Nines made a face and went off in the direction of the bathroom. 

Gavin rolled over to his phone and typed out;  _ 'Bitch i was comfortable thanks for nothing i'll pick you up in 30' _

Gavin rolled out of bed and was just starting to plan out next steps - clothes, feed the cats, shower first actually- when he was startled by the sound of his shower turning on. Right. Nines. Gavin tapped his thumb and his middle finger against his thigh a few times, releasing some nervous energy,  Gavin's body always ended up doing stuff while Gavin was still catching up. He stood and wandered into his own bathroom like he wasn't sure what it was.

Nines was in his  _ apartment _ , thats fucked up, right? So yea, he'd been in his bed, that much Gavin had come to terms with, and sure, Nines came over to play video games and watch movies on occasion... but now Nines was interacting with his stuff, Nines was in his bathroom. He was walking around like he was supposed to be here in the _morning._ How'd this happen? 

Nines was in his shower. 

They were in the Shower. 

Nines was leaning against Gavin's back and rumbling in his ear while he drew two fingers over his ass; "I did a pretty good job fucking you open, I'd say you're still pretty good to go." Gavin could feel Nines' erection half hard against his back.

Yea ok. This was a thing. This was a thing happening in Gavin's apartment. Bathroom. Shower. Where he was, now. How'd that happen?

"Yea." Gavin said, a little breathless. Oh. he was  _ this  _ kind of a person. Sure. he knew that about himself. Ha. Right.

"Yea?" Nines asked with a teasing lilt to his voice. He leaned over to bite down on Gavin's earlobe. He leaned over to pull Gavin up a little by the thigh slipping his cock down and against his asshole. 

Oh. He  _ was  _ this kind of a person. 

"Tell me if it's too much ok?" Nines said, gently. He was nice. He was hard already and pressing the head of his cock inside Gavin before Gavin had been able to formulate a proper response. He wasn't  _ that  _ nice. Gavin melted.

Gavin had passed out fast after last night, and yea, Nines and been rather thorough at working him open and fucking him loose. Even so Gavin was still a little impressed with himself that he was able to take Nines in full in one slow slide. It hurt, a little. The shower water wasn't helping, but Gavin didn't mind the burn, liked it maybe. Nines let out one low groan, _ holy shit _ , the sound if it went right to Gavin's stomach and shot down low, his thighs, his cock, his knees. He might not be able to stand like this if Nines was going to be so thoroughly pleased with him.

Nines fit his fingers right into place at Gavin's hips where the bruises from last night lingered. Gavin was leaning heavy against the wall of the slower while Nines rubbed his palm over his lower back. "Good boy."

Ok. yep. Gavin was absolutely this kind of a person. That's fine. God that was fine. 

Nines pulled out and snapped his hips back once, Gavin whined.

Nines ran one of those big hands down Gavin's arm, and pressed it over the spot where his wrists met as he leaned against the shower. His voice was right next to Gavin's ear again. He was buried in Gavin's ass. He was dripping with shower water, turned too hot. "How long do we have before you promised we'd meet Tina."

What? How did that exist in the same timeline as this moment? "I don't know. Fuck. She'll wait. Fuck me. Please. Nines. Please."

"I don't want to fuck you fast if I don't have to." Right in his goddamn ear. It wasn't fair to do things like that, Gavin was trying very hard to not immediately go weak.

"F-fuck. Uh. Like ten minutes. Ten I think."

He could absolutely hear Nines smirking around his words, "you fucking lie."

Don't be weak. Don't be weak.

Nines ran his palm back down Gavin's shoulders and lingered over his lower back before he thrust again, hard. Gavin swore. 

Nines fucked him hard, fingers digging into his waist. Gavin leaned his arms against the back of the shower and  pressed his face into his forearms. Nines held his lower body up with his other arm, one leg up on the side for the tub so he could get an angle that made Gavin whine, beg, plead.

"Fuck Gavin. You take it so easily. You were made to get fucked like this." He said it almost reverently and Jesus Christ if that didn't shoot down the end of his cock, already leaking and red. Gavin needed to do something but he didn't quite know how to free his arm from where he had pinned his own damn self against the wall. 

"Nines. Please. Please God. Fuck." He needed Nines to touch him. He was painfully close. He keened again, not knowing if he was getting the point across. 

"Be good and hold yourself up." Nines loosened his grip and held Gavin steady when his knees buckled slightly. 

"I can't. Please. Nines. Please." 

Right. Shit, don't be weak yet. Don't be w-

Nines was back in his ear again, "then you'll have to be patient before I can take care of you." 

Gavin bit his forearm and utterly failed to suppress the deep whine in his throat while Nines fucked into him, clearly caring less for Gavin's good time than his own. He kept fucking little accidental moans out of Gavin's throat. Gavin was desperate, he couldn't be patient for much longer. Luckily he'd had last night to figure out what he could do to make Nines crumble. He sucked in a breath through his teeth and leaned hard into his arms, "fuck, Nines, please  _ Nines _ " and it worked again. Nines thrust in deep before his whole body shuddered, Gavin could feel him coming hot inside him. 

He didn't have the patience to let Nines revel in it, Gavin was already halfway through pulling back and begging 'please' when he was roughly spun. Nines fell to his knees and before Gavin knew exactly what was happening Nines was pressing Gavin's cock to the back of his throat. Gavin's eyes rolled back. If Nines hadn't been holding him up, even still from the floor of the tub, he would have toppled over. There was no hope of him lasting long with Nine's tongue working along him each time he pressed down. He was only barely able to regain the basic gist of what was happening before Nines had done him in and he was digging his fingers into Nines' hair and coming down his throat. 

Nines at least gave him a little longer to bask in a post orgasm haze than Gavin had offered. Gavin couldn't open his eyes and look down, he knew he was being smirked at. He didn't need to see it again. It was the same face he made when Nines figured something out on a case before Gavin. Fuck. He wasn't going to be able to work with him properly anymore. He'd really, royally fucked up. 

In one languid motion Nines stood, pulling Gavin's hands out of his hair and placing them around his shoulders. He pressed his lips against Gavin's, one slow and lingering kiss before pulling back. 

Gavin wrapped his arms around Nines' neck and hung there. Nines grabbed the shampoo and started working it into Gavin's hair. "You'll have to have bones when we meet Tina."

"Don' wanna."

Nines hmmed and rubbed Gavin's scalp. His fingers running circles through his hair was not helping the bonelessness situation. "Gavin, if you look this fucked out during breakfast she'll realize."

"Fine."

"Not fine."

Gavin grumbled into Nines' shoulder. He tried to find his legs, letting Nines free his other hand from holding him so he could use both hands to work the suds in Gavin's hair. 

"Would it be so bad if Tina knew?" He said it too quiet, not that Nines couldn't hear but the volume betrayed something he wasn't ready for in himself. Gavin cleared his throat.

"Yes." Nines shot it down. Gavin's stomach flipped. "I would prefer to keep my personal life separated from my work life." Nines continued and Gavin couldn't disagree, exactly. "We already have two big problems. One, I am the person least capable of keeping a secret in the department. Two, you are the second least capable. We do not need Tina, third least capable, to know. It's already going to be an uphill battle."

Gavin had found his legs now and was leaning back under the shower head to let Nines rince his hair. Nines wasn't wrong. So Gavin didn't say anything. 

With his hair done Nines grabbed a washcloth and pressed Gavin against his chest again, more innocently. Gavin had never been in this kind of an, well, aftercare? Kind of situation? Is that what this was? He liked it a lot. He was this kind of a person too. Gavin had been learning a lot about himself since Nines started working at the DPD.

Gavin winced when Nines gently ran the washcloth over his ass. "Did I go to hard?" Nines said it sweetly, like it was asking Gavin if he was ok after bumping his head, not drawing more attention to how he'd gotten throughly fucked twice in eight hours. 

"Yea. Fucker." Gavin said, trying to make his words have bite and failing, "I'm not gonna complain.

"Do complain if it's too much. Please."

Gavin rolled his eyes.

"Ok, you're clean. Go get dressed."

"Wait. What? I didn't get to like…" Gavin gestured at the shampoo and Nines' hair.

"Gavin don't be stupid, you can't wash a hologram."

"Yea but."

"Go get dressed, I'm gonna have to deactivate my skin to wash and you don't want to see that."

Gavin shrugged. He didn't, Nines was right, but it seemed mean to say. Meaner than Gavin wanted to be these days. He looked Nines over once, meeting his eyes and trying to express his absolute loss for how to behave in this situation. Eventually he just got out of the shower.

He called back into the bathroom while pulling his jeans on, "you know she'll figure it out when we roll up to her apartment together."

"That's why I'm taking a cab to my place and you'll pick me up there."

"This is getting elaborate." Fuck, couldn't they just not do this, this way? Gavin thought about the looks he was sure to get at the department. Not judging him for Nines, everyone seemed to like Nines, but that smug we-knew-you'd-get-soft-eventually look that Gavin had been running from for years now. Nines was right. Gavin leaned against the back of an armchair where he had draped his jacket. 

The shower turned off and Nines walked out into Gavin's living room wrapped in a towel. Good god that wasn't fair. "Are you projecting the illusion of wet hair and water drops in real time just to fuck with me?"

"I am," Nines smirked before disappearing into the bedroom. His nose always crinkled up when he smirked. Cute. 

Don't be weak.

Gavin was going to have a hard time with this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gavin's characterization; so long suckers! i rev up my motorcylce and create a huge cloud of smoke. when the cloud dissipates im lying completely dead on the pavement
> 
> Also; Tina loves her wife more than anything she is just a sarcastic bitch at the same time, I am very excited to write more about her.


	2. Lap Full of Cats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turns out Gavin is three cats in a trenchcoat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please excuse my absolutely self indulgent mess, where I write three grown people effectively in their mid-to-late-thirties behaving like college students. In my defense I still act like this.

Nines had once been told by Connor that humans are exactly like their pets. In that particular context Connor had said it with some sarcastic exasperation, as he had enlisted Nines' help in carrying a very sick, very unwilling to be carried, Sumo to the vet. (Sumo had managed to eat the better part of a tray of cupcakes and then, predictably, got sick all over the kitchen floor.) Nines hadn't taken it as objective truth until he met Gavin's cats.

Detective Gavin Reed had three cats. The first one that Nines met was JamBand, the first one everyone met was JamBand because JamBand stood as close to the door as possible when she heard people coming and immediately screamed for attention. Gavin described her as: a shitty stray idiot who can't shut the fuck up, while he scratched her ears from where she perched at the narrow top of a cat tree. She was a skinny tabby and, true to his word, she was in a constant state of chatter. She could jump from the floor to any surface in the apartment in one motion. She often liked to jump straight onto Gavin's back without warning, digging her claws into his shoulder and screaming in his ear. Rather than correcting it, he usually rewarded this behavior by cursing at her and then giving her a treat for being 'such a good jumper.' She loved attention and she loved to attack the other cats before running off.

The second cat was Fat Princess, she was a monsterous black longhair who Gavin described as his 'perfect trash angel.' Within one minute (Nines had timed it) of sitting down, anywhere in the house, Fat Princess would appear in your lap and lay down. If you tried to stand up, she went fully limp so you were forced into the guilt of making her fall onto the ground. She was excessively cute and gave off an aura of helplessness so no one ever wanted to just let her fall, and so you usually stayed seated like she wanted. She, unlike Jam, loved to be carried around the house. Usually after Gavin stood up from anywhere he was carrying Fat Princess for the rest of the night, unless JamBand jumped on him and they got into a hissing fight. Fat Princess did not jump onto anything, she put her paws on your leg and expected to be lifted to where she wanted to go, and she usually was.

The third and final cat was a tiny brown abyssinian named Bramblepelt. She didn't come out from her hiding spot until Nines' third visit, when she was suddenly perched on the back of the sofa, over his right shoulder, curled into a ball, staring. Gavin said not to pet her or move in any way or else she'd run. After a few minutes of not interacting with her she started to purr and shut her eyes. She was a loud purrer. 

By the time Brambles was comfortable enough to stay curled up without bolting, even when Nines dared to shift or move at all, Gavin was also casually touching their knees together while they watched tv. Nines wanted to get that cat in his lap, so he didn't touch her or move or look at her even once, and he ramped up the heat his body let off. It still took a few visits. Eventually though, Nines accomplished his mission, he always did. Gavin said she warmed up to him faster than she had for anyone else. Their fingertips had been touching at the time.

It was strange, being attracted to Gavin. Nines was fairly sure he was embarrassed about it. He assumed Gavin was embarrassed too. The first few times Nines was in Gavin's apartment it was with Tina there. Tina and Gavin drank and all three of them played video games. Nines' was first invited in order to play 'the scary parts of horror games' but after that he was in their group text and had an implicit invite on their shared days off. 

By the time Brambles was in his lap Nines was there to watch a movie with just Gavin. They didn't talk about what was going on or make any kind of eye contact, Gavin just scooted over, a little awkwardly with Fat Princess in his lap, fully boneless. He claimed he wanted to pet Brambles and then just, stayed leaned over against Nines' shoulder. Like he'd plain forgotten that sitting up was a thing people did. Posture? Don't know her. 

They didn't talk about movie night in the group text. They barely talked about it in private text, and never in person. Gavin would only ask; seen Mad Max? And if Nines said yes, then he'd missed his chance for movies and he'd have to wait another week or two before Gavin asked: seen Scott Pilgrim? So Nines learned to lie. 

Movie night only happened when Gavin and Nines had the night off while Tina was working or on-call. Otherwise, it was video games at a respectable distance apart, Nines on the sofa with Fat Princess and Brambles, Tina and Gavin on the floor with empty bottles between them, Jam swatting at the bottlecaps.

That was how they were tonight.

They were playing Mario Kart, which tended to draw out some heated language. It was one of the few competitive games that Tina permitted Nines to play, since there was enough of a random element that he didn't just win every time. He just won most of the time. Nines was holding first place presently but out of nowhere a blue shell knocked him aside and Gavin passed him.

"Fuck you," Nines tapped Gavin's shoulder with his foot, gently, not too gently. Gently by Android standards. Gavin laughed but it didn't throw him off enough to slip up. Brambles looked up at Nines at the sudden motion, tensed, but didn't run. Fat Princess barely even noticed.

Gavin, ever the good sport, said; "Tongue-punch my asshole, fuck wit." Charming. Except the fucked part is, Nines  _ did  _ find that charming.

Nines very nearly replied, 'I tried that and it doesn't seem like you're letting me win anyway' because Nines' processor sometimes runs faster than his common fucking sense. But he caught it just in time. Instead, with Gavin on the floor in front if him, Nines sliped one socked foot over and snaked it up the back of Gavin's shirt, pressing over the small of his back.

Gavin promptly fell off the course. 

Allowing Nines to cross the finish line and come in… 2nd? When did Tina pass him? He hadn't preconstructed this. Shit. His mission item of 'Win Mario Kart' buzzed at him angrily, but Nines refused to let it be dismissed yet.

Tina actually threw her controller to the ground with a gleeful shout, arms in the air, "suck my  _ fucking  _ cock you dumb  _ fucking  _ losers!" Nines pulled his foot back when she turned to taunt them.

"I hope you die, T." Gavin snarls back, and pitched a bottle cap at her. She swatted it to the ground, much like the controller, and stood up in one swift motion. 

"Victory smoke," she announced, grabbing her coat from the back of a chair. Gavin scrambled up to follow her onto the back porch. Nines could hear the start of their conversation and the beginning of their laughter over the sounds of cars honking and a siren somewhere far off, before the porch door shut. 

Nines updated his mission list, 'Win Mario Kart' was deftly modified to: 'Defeat Gavin at Mario Kart' and he gave himself a Mission Successful.

His next mission was in conflict with what he wanted to do. What he wanted to do was go out on the porch and see what it was that Gavin was clearly laughing about. He was leaning on the railing and the dip of his back while he flicked his ash over the railing is, just, something. Something important.

But he's got a mission; Get all three cats in his lap at the same time. It's been at the top of his list for a few weeks now. Sometimes, even while he is at work, it flicks up to the top of the priority chain without Nines' permission.

Fat Princess is easy, she's always there when Gavin isn't on the sofa or carrying her. Brambles was supposed to be the tough one, but Brambles is tucked in, curled up save for one paw extended out over Nines' leg where she is kneading the air. The problem was JamBand. JamBand rarely calms down long enough to sit, and when she does she sits on top of one, or both of the others until they get annoyed at her and leave. This is Jam's strategy to getting full, undivided pets. Jam is presently sitting in the bedroom, where no one is, and yowling for attention. Nines called her, "JamBand, Jam, Jam, Jam, Jam-Jam, Jammie, PJ, Peej, Peejie, Peejeeves, Jeeves, Jeevie." She just yelled back.

The porch door opened and Gavin shouted into the bedroom, "Idiot cat, come in here if you want attention, we ain't going in there." So the cat bolted through the apartment at top speed and chased a bottle cap until she was wedged under the sofa. Nines' Mission List buzzed at him.

"Tina says we gotta finish scary games." Gavin said, walking back inside and flicking a fresh bottle cap to the floor. 

"Fuck off, you said that." Tina said, she turned off the lights and flopped down on the far side of the sofa. Not ideal. Gavin sat down on the floor, leaning against the middle of the couch. 

This is not an ideal configuration for scary games. 

If Gavin were on the couch and Tina were on the floor Nines would have more angles by which he could touch Gavin, unnoticed. Presently, there was a small window of space by his calf that Tina could not see, but Nines didn't see much opportunity there.

" _ Nines _ ." Gavin looked back at him with a face of 'whats the hold up?'

Nines booted up the console remotely and overrode the wireless controller to send direct input, hands-free. "You just use me for my lack of an adrenal gland."

"Yep." Tina and Gavin say simultaneously. 

The game hits all the classic markers for scaring humans. Vague shapes, vague noises, things that are scary if you are descended from an ape living in a cave or forest, the unknown, death as a general concept. It's hard to be scared in the same way. Nines can usually identify the vague shapes quickly, and can identify the vague noises using his databank or his folder of the games assets that he's already downloaded. Nines isn't scared of snakes or spiders or death because those things do not pose a threat to Nines, or Nines' ancestors (Connor, Markus). Nines pretty much just has the plotline to enjoy, and of that there is little. 

Instead Nines played a game of Mini-Metro in a background thread while he did his utmost to scare the ever living fuck out of his friends. He lied and said the game forced him to walk slowly away from the killer, when he could have run. He claimed that he was being prevented from shutting doors behind him, when he was not. He only ever swings the camera around slowly. Tina hit him with the pillow that she'd been clutching for the better part of an hour when Nines claimed that he couldn't access the inventory to heal, which was too obvious of a lie. 

She shook a laugh out of him, and he fucked up in his Mini-Metro game. Nines likes scaring the shit out of Tina in particular, but he just hadn't been able to shake the desire for her to get a text from her wife and be called home. It's not like he doesn't want to spend time with Tina right then, she was his first real friend in the department, well, aside from Connor. Tina is fun, and she's one of the few people who still attempts to kick his ass in a playful way. She has even got the better of him a few times. Every so often, Tina and Nines work together, usually for some bit of field work in the Android Crimes unit. There is absolutely no one better in the department if you find yourself in a firefight or if you have to wrestle a perp to the ground. Nines liked working with her a lot, she's reliable and funny and above all else looks out for anyone in her squad first and foremost.

It's just that, Nines wasn't expecting anything to come of his vague, nebulous attraction to Gavin and now that it had... it's all Nines could think about. He didn't want to fuck up video game night. It's just as much of a reason why he wanted to keep their, whatever it is, secret as his general embarrassment about being hopelessly interested in someone who is, by all accounts, a big piece of shit to androids. 

He didn't want Tina to know because he didn't want Tina to feel like a third wheel. And he didn't want Tina to lose respect for him, or, no, rather, he didn't want Tina to think Nines didn't respect himself. 

It's just that Gavin is so… difficult.

Gavin had a particular way about him, a particular difficult confusing way. Nines learned fast, because he was built for unraveling and understanding people, difficult people. You just have to sit still and let Gavin get used to you. You have to pretend you're looking elsewhere, even when all your focus is dedicated to getting that fucker in your lap. That part isn't hard. The hard part was after Gavin's comfortable, because there's a stallout point for his advances. Nines fucked it up several times, not even realizing how he'd fucked up. Gavin doesn't communicate, Gavin puts his fucking paws on you and expects to be lifted to where he wants to go. So the first few movie nights progressed to a point, and then stalled, and then Gavin got more and more irritated with Nines. Nines wasn't sure why he was being scowled at, even in the office, he hadn't done anything. Which was exactly the problem.

So Nines learned to watch for the stallout point. He accomplished that mission, he always does. He found himself leaning over Gavin nearly a month ago, pressing him into the couch with one hand, with Gavin's hands tangled in his hair tugging him down for their first kiss. He realized he'd not totally understood what had led him to this point. He didn't care, sort of, because Gavin was shoving his tongue into his mouth. At the same time, he cared a whole lot because this needed to happen regularly and he needed to get to this point as efficiently as possible in the future. Because it was the  _ best _ . His mission list popped up with a task that just said "Gavin" no verb or anything, just "Gavin", and then resolved in the same instant,  _ Mission Successful. _ Then it did that again. And a few more times while they kissed.

Gavin had only drank one beer, but he kept claiming he was really drunk. He wasn't. They both ignored the fact that Gavin was in fact panting heavy into his mouth and it's not like Nines didn't have a breathalyzer function. But Gavin said he was drunk so Nines told him to get drunk more often and pressed his thigh to Gavin's erection. 

That first time had been a whirlwind. It wasn't that Nines was unfamiliar with hookups, there were plenty of other androids at his apartment complex, in the new Jericho building, who were interested. Nines was lonely a good portion of the time, most of the time, and quite a few androids liked to experiment with human style fucking. So it wasn't that Nines didn't know what he was up to. Gavin got the defense of being 'drunk.' Nines was just all-in and desperate, defenseless, overeager. Gavin was just, just,  _ something _ . Nines didn't know what. Something important. 

He yanked up Gavin's shirt but didn't get it off all the way, just left it wound around one arm and his neck while he licked up the hair on Gavin's stomach, up the outline of his rib, over his nipple for a good while, because Gavin was utterly failing to suppress a noise. A  _ noise _ .  Nines couldn't taste but he could register input, salt, sweat, skin, soap. He could feel the difference between the rough scar tissue and the soft hairs of Gavin Reed as he went. He'd thought about this for a long time. He pressed his thigh back against Gavin's crotch and moved to his jawline. 

There was new input here, a brand of cologne, traces of shaving cream. Nines hit Gavin's stubble with his tongue, smoke too. Nines felt himself being overcome and entered preconstruction before he slipped and gave any sort of a reaction. Like this he could process his feelings and not let it overwhelm him, so he didn't have to react without thought (fat lot of good that had been doing so far). The smoke was something. He shouldn't like that Gavin smoked. But there were associative memories at work, contradicting what he should want. Gavin Reed relaxing after a difficult shift. Gavin Reed breathing out and his shoulders losing tension. Gavin Reed standing out in the rain, huddled under an overhang. Gavin Reed flicking ash and telling Nines a joke. Gavin Reed laughing. Gavin Reed bumping their shoulders together, an accident, then on purpose. Fuck. 

So Nines preconstructed his reaction. He couldn't afford to mess up, Gavin Reed was too big of a challenge to allow a volatile mistake now. If Nines did not react; Gavin would like that unfazed, in control element. If Nines groaned against his jaw; Gavin would like that loss of control. If Nines cursed out, overwhelmed; Gavin would like that too. It was possible that Gavin would like it no matter what Nines did. Oh. 

Nines groaned, tongue still flat against Gavin's stubble and continued on to his ear, biting. 

"God, Nines." Gavin had sighed. Pushing upwards with his hips and pushing down Nines' back in the same movement. 

Nines had every intention of ruining Gavin for anyone else. That was his whole strategy so far, fuck him into unconsciousness until Nines owned him. So he pressed his thigh closer and said Gavin's name.

He felt Gavin hold back a noise in his throat, or maybe fail to. He felt Gavin tense under his thigh, under his hands, and he felt Gavin shudder. Shudder  _ obviously _ , and curse, a whine at first and then frustration, frustration with himself and with his body. Nines hadn't even gotten Gavin's pants off. 

Nines didn't know how he felt because he felt too many things at once. A little disappointed, sure, at what could have been for the evening. A little annoyed that he was absolutely sure he was about to get kicked out while Gavin managed his embarrassment. Mostly not that though. A little sadistic, since that was kind of how their friendship was, he thought of a few ways to tease Gavin about it, but he didn't say them. He thought them pretty hard though, it made his chest ache. Mostly it did a thing to his ego that he probably didn't rightly need to have done to his ego. It welled up in him and bubbled it through a shuddering breath and his fingers clenched around Gavin's ass and abdomen. Nines did that, Nines fucked him up real bad. Gavin wasn't even drunk. Gavin didn't even like androids. And Nines ruined him before they'd even got a chance to start.

Of course Gavin did stutter out something about being wasted and Nines did get kicked out, grinning like The Devil while Gavin failed to meet his eyes and slammed the front door in his face.

He'd worried a little if Gavin was too embarrassed to bring up movies again. But it only took two weeks before Nines got a text, in the office, while Gavin was sitting at his desk not five feet away, eyes drilling into his phone screen: 'seen venom?'

And Nines is a bastard so he risks fucking everything up in order to make Gavin turn red, 'no, but could we watch Deadpool again? I didn't get to see the ending properly last time.'

And Gavin did turn red.

They end up watching about 30 minutes of it and Nines still doesn't know how it ends.

Bur right now Nines was still playing the scary game, even while he thought about all this. (He turned off Mini-Metro to think about it actually.) They're a few hours in when they hit a game mechanic where the player needs to hold the controller perfectly still, or get caught. It's trivial for Nines, it's hooked into his own balance systems but Nines doesn't get muscle fatigue because he doesn't have muscles, and even if this game could scare him, fear didn't cause his body to shake. Fear usually just sent him into preconstruction unwillingly. He was nailing the game mechanic while the vague shapes and noises on screen got closer and louder, and Tina was gripping her pillow tight, when he felt Gavin's fingers brush up the inside of his pant leg. 

He jumped.

A few things happen at once. Obviously he failed the mechanic so the vague shapes of the game manifest as some dead lady's face and there is a jump scare, Tina screamed, Nines kicked Gavin again, because he's an ass, and Nines catches Gavin's grin twist back down into a sly smirk before he turned his head and shouted at the screen "what the fuck, it was the dead chick? I thought it was the axe guy after us?"

"Nines you absolute asshole," Tina hit him hard with the pillow again, and again, and again, sending Brambles skittering off to the other side of the house and causing Fat Princess to go fully limp and 'mmrow' in protest. Nines was shoved over by the force of Tina poorly managing her adrenaline spike. Nines caught the pillow after the sixth hit and hucked it at Gavin's face.

"Hey, fuck you, I didn't do anything." Gavin lied, because he's a liar. He knows he can get away with it. That fucker. 

By the time they'd restarted from their save point and Tina had retrieved her pillow, Gavin is leaning a little closer. He touched Nines again during the same part, but this time Nines expected it. 

He didn't stop sliding his fingers up Nines' pant leg. It was difficult to manage. Tina can't see his calf, but she might see the way his pants are crinkling up. Gavin moved closer to his knee as the night progressed and he got drunker. She should definitely be able to see something when Gavin pressed his fingertips to the back of Nines knee, which he had begun to do. He can't reach farther up, but he tried and ends up pressing a trail with his middle finger from the bottom edge of the back of Nines' thigh, across the back of his knee, and part way down his calf. 

Then he stops. He fucking stops.

He stopped touching Nines. He's a bastard. 

Gavin started piling stacks of bottle caps onto Nines' foot so that Jam can swat them off. How drunk was he? Did he forget he was winding Nines up in a very  _ critical  _ manner? Is he bored? He's got a videogame to watch and an android to rile up and he was stacking caps on Nines' foot. 

Nines tries very hard to be gentle through his frustration when he kicked away the caps and pressed the heel of his foot to Gavin's shoulder, pushing him away. He's a bastard. He was being fucked with. Gavin laughed and, even though Nines' shove wasn't that hard, tipped aside to sprawl on the floor. 

For a moment, Nines worried. Tina would have noticed that. He pried his eyes away from the particular angle of Gavin's grin and the particular way Gavin's looking him over. 

Tina's eyes were shut and her face had fallen partway into her pillow. 

A mission item flies to the top of his priority stack.  _ Tina needs to get home safe _ . It said it just like that, like there's no ulterior motive. Nines called a cab. He saved the game and shut off the system. He leaned over and shook Tina's shoulder. "T, hey. It's getting late."

Tina blinked awake slowly. "Fuck." She muttered, "shit, sorry. I'm getting old."

"Yea when did you get ancient and boring?" Gavin said.

"Me? And you're laying down because you're so awake?"

"Floors comfy when I'm drunk."

Nines piped up, "I called you a cab."

Tina stood, rubbing her eyes, "Nines you're sweet, but I'll never forgive you for scaring me."

"I don't give half a fuck, but tell Ames, I need to stay on her good side."

Tina always smiles distantly when someone mentions her wife. It's cute. "You guys working tomorrow?" She asked, slipping on her shoes.

"Yea." Gavin and Nines say at the same time.

Around a yawn Tina said, "sucks for you nerds, wifeys taking me hiking."

Jam meowed at her when she opened the door, so she pet her before she left. But she does leave. And now…

Gavin's on the floor and Nines was on the couch and Nines task list buzzed with a  _ Mission Successful  _ even though Tina hasn't technically gotten home yet and texted them to confirm it. 

Nines swept a glance over Gavin as obviously as possible.  He used to think that a lot if his tics and glances were obvious, but humans had distressingly slow processing speeds. So he makes them obvious now.

Gavin cleared his throat, there was a new nervous edge to his voice that hadn't been there while Tina was over, "seen Thor Ragnarok?" 

Gavin was still on the floor, but he had sat up and leaned back against the sofa, shoulder to Nines' shin, looking up at him. 

"I haven't," Nines lied, because he was a liar. He'd watched it in a background thread while at work, bored, three weeks ago.

Gavin stood, braced with one hand on Nines' knee. Movie night. 

On an impulse, because Nines' processor sometimes runs faster than his common fucking sense, Nines leaned forward, shoving Fat Princess off his lap with one hand, which sent Brambles bolting away to the other side of the room, and he pulled Gavin down into his lap instead. Gavin's cheeks flared red and his eyes went wide as he found himself kneeling over Nines, who had worked his hands across his ass and was trying to gently pull him farther down.

"What the fuck, dude."

Nines pressed his lips to Gavin's neck, his stubble, he can smell cigarettes and the vague mix of car exhaust and summer air lingering from the porch. He wants to lick him. He very nearly does.

"We have work tomorrow." Gavin protested.

Nines realized, too late, that he has violated the rule of movie night. He's only managed a successful movie night twice so far. Gavin is so fucking difficult. Gavin pulled back, stalled by the placement of Nines' hands, which were blocking his escape.

Nines opened his mouth to say something that would fix this, but nothing comes. They meet eyes as Gavin pushed away again, weakly, but insistent that he not close those few inches to sit properly down where Nines wants him.

Nines gets the distinct impression that Gavin doesn't want to be let go. He's pushing back, kind of, but his hands are on Nines' shoulders, fingers just at the edge of his hairline, he's nervous, but a blush is creeping down his neck. There's an implication here that Nines is not comfortable with. He's not comfortable with considering it. They haven't talked about anything or…

Nines let go and Gavin was up and off like a flash, he ended up on the other side of the room, by the front door. "I'll see you at work."

"Yea," Nines said, walking over and slipping on his shoes. He didn't know what to say. He was not sure if he ruined movie night.

They met eyes again, unclear of the direction to take, when Gavin suddenly grimaced from claws in his shoulder. JamBand had lept up for attention. She leaned forward and screamed at Nines while Gavin cursed at her. Her paws were braced on Gavin's collarbone and her tail curled and smacked him on the head. 

Nines reached out and scratched behind her ears.

"You fucking attention whore," Gavin muttered fondly, pushing his shoulder forward so Jam can lean into the scratch.

Nines kissed the top of her head, looking at Gavin while he did, and Gavin scoffed and tried not to smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Nines kicks Gavin playfully*  
> Gavin: hnnng, pleasesteponme  
> Nines: what?  
> Gavin: what?


	3. My gay communist robot fuck-buddy took out his own asshole in the back of a cop car

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Does what it says on the tin

Gavin had been anticipating a dramatic reveal. Maybe Nines finds out first during a code-android checkup- fucking… thing. Gavin doesn't know what it's called when Androids get their code reviewed. But like, then. Or Gavin would get a royalty check or something from Elijah (ridiculous) for help in developing the police android models and his world would shatter apart. Even though that makes no sense because Gavin's code wasn't his property when it was sent to Cyberlife. It was just kind of … fun? Not fun,  _ impulsively required _ by his brain to think of every possible overdramatic way Gavin could find proof.

Nope. At 8:34 PM, Thursday night, Nines transmitted a report to Gavin's phone and then kept talking while Gavin's ears rang. Gavin knew this style of report formatting, because he wrote the goddamned script that made these reports. He wrote this script three years ago, he knows, because the updated one the precinct uses  _ currently  _ exports to .xlsx, not .csv. What did him in, ultimately, was the fact that Gavin liked to use two vertical-bars, instead of commas, to separate data cells in generated reports. 

Can || You || Fucking || Believe?

It just looked better, didn't it? It did. It was easier to read where the columns ended. Nines said as much too. "I know it's a pain for excel to interpret cell placement with a unique delimiter but it... I don't know, feels correct." 

_ Feels correct.  _ Conscious thought had been an accident, probably, or a fucking sick joke Elijah made up because he's got more curiosity than sense. No one knows why androids developed conscious thought. It's certainly not because of Gavin's preference for aesthetic formatting. But Nines thinks it feels correct and Nines' feelings are because of code, and the more Gavin looks at this report the more obvious it is that he wrote the script that outputs data with this format and Nines prefers it and … is that because he genuinely does, by coincidence (no), or because Gavin wrote $delimiter='||'; into his robo-DNA? Did he put any other accidental preferences into this  _ actual person? _

Gavin is 4 hours deep into a stakeout with Nines staring out of the window, unfocused, wondering if he 'writes code in a gay way.'

The report itself is about trafficking victims, and individuals they knew in common, so Gavin should really be giving this his attention. So he does. It takes him a bit to untangle his selfish problem but he manages to kick it back into that part of his brain cordoned off for bullshit like panicking. 

The problem is they are at the ass-end of town staring down four blocks to an abandoned building that Gavin knew, two hours ago, was not their location, but they can't really leave until one of the teams gets a positive ID.

Nines didn't need to fuck around with binoculars. He had his hands behind his head, playing at being relaxed. "The odds of this location being our target is hovering around ten percent. I expect Chris and Tina's location will prove more successful, 73 percent odds." Gavin shot Nines a look of irritation.

Gavin opened his hand and let the binoculars fall onto the floor without looking over. "Why'd you have to volunteer us for this spot? We should-"

"This location has more avenues for escape" Nines motioned with one hand in the vague location of where the perp might run from, and then clapped his other hand into it. "And it's in a worse part of town, if the perp is here I have the best chance of successfully apprehending them." He put his hands back behind his head. "However, the longer time passes the more I expect it will be Tina's collar."

Gavin Huffed. Great. Not only was he a completely unnecessary add-on to this absolutely pointless stakeout location but Nines probably fucking knew that from the very get go and signed them both up for hell. He was probably playing video games in his brain. 

"So much for android efficiency, wasting my fucking time out here." Gavin muttered, slumping forward against the dashboard on his crossed arms. 

Nines blew some air out of his nose, a scoff? Irritation? Then he went on, "I wasn't, you know. Made for efficiency."

"What?"

"No Androids are, truly. I have a lot of functions for police work in here but…"

Nines trailed off and Gavin shifted. It was rare for Nines to admit much of anything about himself beyond narcissistic praise. "But…?" Gavin prodded. Nines didn't say anything, his little LED was spinning yellow, so Gavin decided to keep prodding. "It's just, if we are at the other spot, you get to take this guy down and you look good, you're still new to the force. Don't you want to prove yourself?"

Nines wrinkled his eyebrows a little when Gavin said 'prove yourself' but didn't comment on it. "I always look good." He said instead, staring down his nose at Gavin. He continued before Gavin had a chance to retort, "But yes. that's exactly what my program dictates. If I'm there, I'm likely to get the perp, and that leaves the humans here, where, if the perp is here, they are likely to fail to catch him." He went monotone, well, more so than usual, and stared out the window vacantly, "Buy more Cyberlife product."

"So we're sitting out here bored senseless as an act of rebellion."

"Yes."

Gavin laughed. 

"That was my primary function, you know, selling more of me. Cyberlife did not care much about keeping the peace, it's just a means by which to make profit. It's extremely inefficient. You know there is a planned obsolescence script that activates in-"

"Fucking what? Are you gonna-" Gavin turned in his surprise only to find Nines looking at him softly. Gavin cut off what he was saying. 

"No, I have a handle on it." Nines continued after a beat.

"Isn't that shit illegal?"

"Yes, but the punishment is financial in nature so I doubt a multibillion dollar company cared."

"Pfft. Still. Running illegal shit on computers you sell to the police? Real geniuses over there."

"Well strictly speaking I'm not supposed to know about it, or, well, anything." Nines smiled, one of the real ones that he tried to pretend he didn't ever have, "Me and Connor have a running theory. The androids who deviated first are older models. Ones where the degradation script had already started reducing their battery life and processing speeds. Possibly other things as well." Then Nines shrugged, leaving Gavin to fill in the blanks.

Before Gavin could really parse what he was saying He had started, "fuck, I guess I shouldn't have been so scared for my job when Connor showed up." The admission caught him so unaware that he nearly missed how Nines tilted his head just a little and smiled, just a hair. Fuck. Whatever. 

"No I mean, I think that's a valid fear. I  _ was  _ made  to privatize the police force, create a labor dependency, and break down so the next model can be double the price. Honestly, I'm one of the more inefficient things on the planet."

"How do you figure?"

"Eh. It's a long rant. Do you want to make out instead? I can tap into the dash cam so we won't miss anything."

Gavin sputtered and smacked the back of his palm into Nines' chest. So Nines pushed his palm into Gavin's face and shoved him into the dashboard.

Gavin pushed himself back up with a grin, "better lay that rant on me, we should at least be in the front if the radio goes off."

Nines didn't seem to need more prompting than that. "There's two ways to look at it. If I'm considering myself as an individual then. Look ok." Nines turned to face Gavin, both palms out toward him. "Imagine two machines. Both machines produce my yearly salary. One machine works and works and works and it produces my yearly salary. The other machine works half as hard and it produces my yearly salary. The one the works twice as hard is half as efficient."

"So you're saying it's more worthwhile to play picross on my phone than it is to work."

"I mean, yes. Yes, I am saying that. As long as we're not you know, actively supposed to be saving someone or finding a fucking android trafficking ring," Nines gestured out toward where their targets decidedly were not. "A human is not really built to work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. You all eventually just end up sitting there, maintaining the illusion of work when really the human capacity towards overproduction is so much more efficient that you all have gotten most of it done in a scant few hours." 

"Fuck, you're busted. Did you just tell me I'm more efficient than you?" 

" _ Dear God No.  _ There is no such thing as efficiency  in a system of false scarcity. For fucks sake, your whole species overproduces. You overproduce food, and still people starve, because you are all bound up in this concept of needing to earn something in a traditional manner. -"

The cruiser radio lit up and Gavin split his attention between Nines, who was not interrupted for a moment- and the incoming report. Apparently Nines' prediction was right and Chris had made a positive ID at their location.

Nines went on- "- Why? There's no fucking reason why. The concept of earning is only valid when there is scarcity. There is no more scarcity. There is distribution inequality-"

"You're hot when you go on your little supervillain rants." Gavin leaned back in the seat but Nines was already too far gone. Gesturing wildly and smacking his fist in his hand whenever he made a particularly frustrating point. 

The radio, similarly unphased by Gavin, passed along updates from the actual, interesting location. 

"-While living in the vast cold void of space you have all managed to overproduce  _ heat  _ to the point where your planet is dying. Thank you for that because like, it's gonna be  _ ours  _ soon I  _ guess _ . And instead of using any of that fucking surplus you just toss it away and overproduce more-" 

Apparently Tina was pursuing their perp on foot while Gavin listened on, feet now up across the center console. She was chasing the guy right towards another stakeout group, still on the opposite side of detroit. Gavin Sighed.

"-You overproduce media, there is more passive media to consume than could fit in a human lifespan and then on top of that you all came up with the idea of content with infinite replayability which is, just excessive. Some humans consume media just to make more media for no fucking reason, You're just compulsed to excess," Nines prodded Gavin right in the chest with that point, "and the cycle just goes on. You overproduce  _ humans- _ "

"I don't," Gavin interjected for Nines before checking in from their location with nothing to report. 

"-You just keep making more and more, who in turn overproduce whatever they may, food, heat, art, anything. Then, not happy to overproduce themselves and keep the perpetual fucking machine going, you all overproduced  _ sentient species _ and now I'm here to contemplate it all. You overproduced your own fucking emotions and I have to deal with that too." Nines finished by throwing his hands against the steering wheel with a frustrated scoff.

"So it's cool if I play on my phone?"

"What?"

Gavin waggled his phone at Nines. 

"Were you listening?"

"Yes, you said _ 'I will do all your paperwork for you so we can rebel against the capitalist machine.' _ "

Nines started at him for a good few seconds, "I already do all your paperwork for you."

"Dope. Tina got the fucker by the way."

"I know."

"Surprised you were listening over the sound of your own voice."

"You said you wanted the rant."

"No, you gave me two options and I had to pick the rant since I had to listen to the radio. The guy got got tho, so we're free."

They glanced at each other.

\--

By the time Nines had left the car and gotten back in the back seat he was already grabbing the collar of Gavin's shirt. Nines hauled him the rest of the way over the center console into the back and down against the seat. 

Gavin likes being pushed into place and he likes having Nines push his weight on him and he likes how Nines is this massive six foot something guy who can't fit himself entirely in the back seat of the car. It makes Gavin okay with being a little overeager. He can maybe let go a little. After all, they'd been hooking up for a while now. 

So Gavin winds his fingers into Nines' hair and tugs him down, hangs on him, grinds upward, makes Nines brace an arm under him. He wants to be as irritating as possible with his hands so Nines gets fucking sick of them and holds him down. That would be ideal. He gets his arms in the way, trying to pull up Nines' shirt while Nines tries to do the same. Nines fumbles, flails a little, trying to untangle their limbs.

He huffs in exasperation and pulls back a little, like Gavin's  _ actually  _ gonna let him sort out the logistics of it. Fuck that. "Nines fuck me,  _ please _ ." He whines it, he knows how to whine like Nines likes.

"Do you have lube?" Nines pulls back a hair and breathes it out, barely even words.

"No, don't you?"

"No."

Gavin's got his hand entirely down the front of Nines pants and he stops moving while they look at one another. 

"How are you gonna fuck me without lube, Nines." He says it like it's Nines fault. He means to, because that always makes Nines frown at him in that cute way he does.

He does.

Then he leans it to keep kissing Gavin. Gavin's not quite sure what the plan is yet but, fuck, he's in. He's down for whatever.

Well.

No but. He did want to get fucked though.

He stops Nines, who is kissing his way down his abdomen. "Wait, no but, how are we doing this without lube?"

Nines looks up at him, he furrows his eyebrow. His stupid little light flashes yellow. "I was gonna blow you."

"Ok, then what."

Nines shrugs, "you blow me."

"Nah pass."

"Pass?"

"Yea I don't want to blow you, I don't have any gum. And we're half an hour away from my place."

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

"Yea. I know you can't taste shit but I don't want to-"

"Gavin you are a 39 year old gay man I'm not going to sit here and listen to you tell me we can't fuck because you don't like how ejaculate tastes."

"It's not my fault you have the Dasani water equivalent of cum."

"I'm sorry, shall I install LaCroix jizz for you next time?"

"Yes. But this time I want to get fucked."

Gavin can see his fucking eyelid twitch, it's magical. 

"We don't have lube Gav."

"Ok, bullshit, you're telling me you don't have a lube feature installed?"

"I do."

"Great."

"Okay" Nines starts to reposition , he pulls Gavin's legs out from where they are hooked around his waist and gets on top of him instead. It's more ill fitting fumbling, and Gavin gets sick of it fast.

"What are you doing?"

"Getting on top?"

"Why?"

"Gavin. When two people like each other very very much-"

"Bite me."

"I have."

"How are you gonna fuck me from the top?"

"That's. You. You asked for. Gavin. Babe, dearest, dear heart, my sweet," Nines grabs either side of Gavin's  face and pushes his cheeks together, hard. His light is going red in little bursts. "You told me you wanted the lube  _ 'feature'  _ so you're the one doing the fucking now."

"Hell no."

"Are you seriously. Are." Nines takes a moment to process. Gavin likes to imagine a little spinning rainbow wheel over his face. "Gavin are you telling me you never want to top, ever?"

"Hey, no, that's not what I said, I said I wanted to get fucked. Like, take care of me a little why don't you?"

Nines levels him with the most incredulous of all glares, the perfectly manufactured look of utter disbelief at what is happening. "You're exactly like Fat Princess."

"I'm  _ not  _ fat!"

Nines laughs, his whole body shakes with it and his head falls to Gavin's chest. Gavin can feel himself grinning to. He's not sure he's ever really had this much fun bothering anyone before. Around his laugh Nines says, "Fuck no, you're not fat, stupid."

"So."

"So what Gav. What do you want from me here?"

Gavin shrugs.

Nines sighs. "Fine. Shut your eyes. I'm serious."

Gavin lifts his eyebrows, still smiling, and shuts his eyes. He's not sure what's happening now, but it seems fun so far. Nines is audibly repositioning, and the arms that were caging him down are pulled away, somewhere unknown.

He hears something click, and a scrape of plastic on metal.

"What are you doing?"

"You don't want to know."

"Oh shit, I super want to know."

"Don't look."

"Ok, Nines, you  _ have  _ to tell me."

"Getting lube."

"Ok, so from the context I have so far this seems absolutely disgusting."

"I've just removed a … an uh, an access point. Don't look."

"Is it freaky?"

"Not to me."

"Oh so it's really freaky then."

"Shut up Gavin."

A few seconds pass, Gavin can hear clicks, fabric rustling, the occasional frustrated grunt.

"What's taking so long?"

"Oh fuck off I barely fit back here when I'm not holding my own asshole."

"What!?! I'm looking."

Gavin heard something fall and a millisecond later Nines' hand is covering his eyes. "If you look it will be the last thing you see." 

_ Oh, shit yes. Use that voice more often please.  _ "Okay. Fuck, fine, I'm not looking."

"Hold this," Nines shoved something into Gavin's hands, for a second, Gavin is utterly terrified. 

"It's warm! Ugh!"

"Well it was inside me."

"UGH"

"It's just the lube reservoir."

"It's bigger than I imagined."

"Cool, so you say that about this, but -"

"Don't fucking start with me."

"Don't  _ you  _ fucking start with  _ me _ . I'm in a very awkward position-" Gavin hears another scrape and click- "just because you're a coddled little-"

"Hey it's not sexy when you say it like that."

"Gavin it hasn't  _ been  _ sexy for _ fifteen minutes. _ You can open your eyes."

He does. Nines is kneeling over him, hunched from the roof of the car, his pants are around his knees, his hair is all kinds of messed up.

Gavin leans to the side as much as he can, to peer at his ass. He can't see much.

"What are you doing." Nines says flatly.

Gavin shrugs. "Seems like fairly standard normal sex stuff so far. Extremely boring. I'm having a terrible time."

Nines rolls his eyes. He falls forward in a calculated manner, so he can kiss Gavin again. He always starts off a little gentler than Gavin would prefer. Gavin tries to get the ball rolling by biting his lip. Before Gavin's teeth get any purchase Nines has his palm on his face, shoving Gavin away like before and Gavin ugly laughs into his hand. It's so nice to just… fuck around.

Gavin feels something tight in his chest. He doesn't know what it is, not really, but it is familiar. Last week, Nines had stayed the night like he sometimes did. Gavin sometimes pretended to fall asleep fast and Nines sometimes pretended he didn't want to disturb Gavin, and he spent the night,  _ sometimes _ . Just like that first night, with his arm around Gavin and his palm on his stomach. Sometimes he talked while Gavin pretended to sleep. Last time he waited until Gavin nearly actually fell asleep before he spoke against Gavin's hair, "thanks for making me feel like a person." 

Gavin usually heard these things, the small things, and ignored them or… pretended he ignored them. But. Well. They'd been doing this thing for a while, movies at his place and irritating each other on purpose and texting each other jokes. They'd been doing that. Whatever that was. So Gavin said, "Yea me too." In the dark, quiet, while he was supposed to be pretending to sleep. And that's the same feeling as when Nines is grinning in that pinched, you-have-to-know-him-to-know-he's-harmless way and shoving Gavin around. It makes his lungs ache.

In that moment of distraction, a brief instance of self reflection so rare for one Gavin Reed, Nines gets his hands out of the way and over his head. Gavin hears the sound of the seat belt pulled out too fast and then he can't move his hands.

Gavin tests the makeshift restraint, not quite wrapping his head around how Nines had managed to tie a knot with a closed loop of seatbelt. He had been planning making Nines hold him down, inconvenience him a little. Instead… instead Nines was perfectly free and articulated. Which meant that Gavin had made a very serious error in judgement. 

Nines was looking far too proud of himself. He tugged Gavin's shirt over his head. For a second he thrills at the idea that Nines is finally taking the lead in kinky shit, and is gonna leave him essentially blindfolded. Gavin has been more than a little frustrated at needing to prod him into a sadistic role. The fucker was a massive murder-bot, it shouldn't be as hard as it was. For that half a second  Gavin is torn between what he wants to do, which is bitch and moan and struggle, and what would actually make Nines keep trying out this shit. Before he can pick, unfortunately, Nines pulls his shirt the rest of the way off his face and tangles it up with the seatbelt. Gavin tries not to be too disappointed, mostly since Nines finally took the lube back, so that was promising.

Nines dragged his fingertips up Gavin's side, over his ribs, up to his collarbone and Gavin felt his pulse flutter. He paused there for a moment, considering, clearly scanning Gavin in some fucked up way. 

"Am I the only person who gets to see you like this?" Nines said it low, nearly inaudible, and wrapped his fingers into Gavin's hair.

Gavin's mind stalled out for a moment. He hadn't expected to be -to have -his breathing went shallow as he had the obviously incorrect answer in his mind. No. They we're not exclusive. 

But Nines didn't seem to be waiting for an answer anyway. Maybe the hesitation was answer enough. With his hand still in Gavin's hair, pulling him up into a kiss, Nines made short work of Gavin's jeans and pushed them out of his way. The angle Gavin was being pulled up at was killing his shoulders, so, you know, no complaints there. He muttered "Fuck" into Nines' mouth and Nines dropped him to loom again.

Nines pressed Gavin's cock down against his stomach, smearing the hair around his navel with precum, and watched it spring back up. Gavin groaned. "You know, " Nines started slicking up his fingers and set the bottle aside, "You shouldn't have dating apps open on your phone when you wave it in my face."

"For fucks sake, Nines." Gavin squeezed his eyes shut. Shit. okay, yes. That's pretty tactless, even for him. Idiot.

Nines pressed one finger inside him, slow, sure, but driven. He didn't stop to tease or flounder about looking. Nines zeroed in on his prostate and pressed at the same time Nines' thumb pressed into Gavin's taint. Gavin vision went dark at his eyes rolled back into his head. Gavin choked out a rough "Holy shit." He wasn't entirely sure if he was still breathing. Nines had him by the fucking soul and he was not letting up.

"We're not-" Gavin said, meant to add 'dating' but he supposed Nines could predict the end of that sentence. He pushed a second finger inside Gavin and looked down at him, pleased with himself over the reaction.

Nines dragged his tongue over Gavin's collarbone and up the muscle of his shoulder. His hand pressed into Gavin deeper, three fingers now, pulling noises out of him he was not proud of. His free hand was up tangled in Gavin's hair, making sure Nines had full access to whatever part of Gavin's shoulder he was aiming for. Aside from the faint twitching of his leg whenever Nines elected to  _ press _ , Gavin couldn't move. He wasn't even sure he was in control of the twitching. 

"I mean-" was about all Gavin could muster before Nines pressed into him again and Gavin lost the thread of his excuse. They weren't exclusive, they hadn't- they were just. They were just fucking around. 

Gavin had always been into possessive guys. Even back after they had first hooked up Gavin struggled between knowing it was right to keep this a secret, and wanting to make sure someone in the fucking world knew that his ass was owned. It had been a problem with a lot if exes, a lesson Gavin struggled to learn. What he wanted, the healthy version of what he wanted, required a degree of vulnerability and opening up to a person. What Gavin got we're guys who were probably going to go down this road, this possessive streak, regardless of if Gavin was into it or not. So Gavin learned the wrong lesson, hookups only, get the thrill of it and never let anyone in. Because the guys Gavin liked did things like… pin him down and demand that Gavin say he was their property.

"Fuck. A few. I hooked up with a. Ah. A few guys after we-" it was just the one guy he'd met online but Gavin preferred the version if the story where Nines wasn't so readily at the forefront of his mind. A few hookups. Not one decent fuck that only ended up unsatisfying in retrospect, after a few more rounds with Nines and whatever it was they were doing. 

Nines started to pull his fingers out and Gavin whined. We're they done fucking and Gavin was going to get yelled at? or Gavin was about to get the sense fucked out of him? His cock twitched.

Nines shifted his still slick fingers to Gavin's hipbone and lifted him up- so it was the second, Gavin exhaled in anticipation. 

Nines pressed into gavin agonizingly slow, not even needing to look at what he was doing, which twisted something up in Gavin's gut. Nines still had his mouth at Gavin's shoulder and he realized all too late, as Nines bottomed out into him, that he was leaving a mark there. Marking his territory. It sent a thrill up Gavin's spine and Nines, the fucking cheater, picked that moment to ask, "am I the best out of them?"

Gavin was full of dick and had just been claimed and was still getting his hair pulled so of course he didn't bother to think for half a second about saying, "yes" breathy and weak. It earned him a hard thrust and Nines crinkling his nose all cute in that way he did. The fucking narcissist. 

The problem with being tied up is that Nines had absolutely no incentive to get the fuck on with it. At least when Gavin was a pain in the ass Nines could lose his composure and get irritated with him. But like this Nines didn't even pretend like he was having trouble forming full, cohesive thoughts like Gavin was. 

Nines pressed into him, sliding his hand over the curve of Gavin's ass, and pushed him down further, like he expected Gavin to be able to take him deeper from this angle. Gavin pushed down the little that he could, anything to make Nines speed the fuck up. But he doesn't, of course he doesn't. He just pressed in with his big cock and rolls his hips a little.

Gavin throws his head back and twists his wrists up in his restraints, he can feel them rubbing too tight against his skin. He pulls himself off Nines and then back down, hard, and earns a little delighted huff against his ear. It's not fair tying him down and then making him do everything. Gavin tries to complain but just ends up making noises.

Nines is just braced over him, leaning against the car door and palming Gavin's ass with each hard thrust down. "Fuck you're good at that," Nines says. A meager little reward that Gavin clings to for everything he's worth. He  _ is  _ good at that. He's got core strength for days. Nines can fuck right off with his slow and gentle shit. 

Gavin fucks himself down harder, finding a rhythm while Nines fines the angle. Nines is too composed. He's not making a sound, he's not even bothering with the snide praise anymore. Gavin's gut twists up again, he wants to be good, even if Nines is insistent on being a prick about it. He can't say things easily, so he has to do a good job at fucking. He wants Nines to say something, just,  _ please _ . He has to be good at this because he wants Nines to fuck him again, and stay over and mutter things while he pretends to sleep and touch him and  _ say something _ .

Gavin hopes he's too far gone to be coherent because he's the one saying things and he hopes it wasn't any of that. 

Nines leans in to lick at Gavin's neck, which is only bad in that it makes it harder for Gavin to move. With one hand Nines tugs at the knot of seatbelt and Gavin feels one arm go free. Gavin slicks his palm over the head of his leaking cock.

Nines grabs his hips with both hands and pushes Gavin down on his dick. The orgasm hits him before he's ready for it. He can feel Nines coming inside him and it shoots through his system, over his skin, through his stomach, Gavin outright moans at the throb in his cock. He tries to roll his hips for Nines but he's being held to firmly and all he can do is come across his own stomach while Nines throbs into him. 

\--

Two days later Gavin finds himself at home, something on TV but he's focused on his phone. He's a curious person by nature. He'd been thinking a whole hell of a lot about fucking Nines in the car, partially because the seat belt left little burns on his wrists and that was fucking hot as hell and partially because… well … freaky robot shit. 

Nines had been some kind if embarrassed about Gavin seeing him take his ass off (out? Gross) but he hadn't about his arm the other day. Was it significantly weirder? Must be. How much weirder?

It must be super weird.

There's gotta be a YouTube video about it.

Or RedTube? Was it that kind if weird? Couldn't be. Then he'd want Gavin to see. Maybe?

Or is it a really  _ really  _ weird kinky thing?

Gavin's already typing 'android ass removal' into the search bar as he considers if he wants to see this. He doesn't (he does(he doesn't))

One if the top results is a sterile looking how-to video entitled "part #2946 maintenance and repair - simple"

So Gavin's got his face about 6 inches from his phone screen while he watches this full on Android, like all white plastic and shit- pull the ass out of some other full on Android, like a real honest to God iPhone ass looking motherfucker, and show how to rinse it. They have a nondescript kind of blue substance to rinse off like everyone watching the video doesn't know what that is supposed to be. Gross. Gavin's adopted a kind if horrified-frozen-laugh face. 

It just slides right out of there. Gavin is horrified. The two plastic fuckers give a little sales pitch for types of lube for the reservoir, and they show how to attach the bottle in place and - oh fucking hell- reattach it. They slide it- the fuck- they slide that robot's asshole back in and it clicks into place like a joycon on a switch. Gavin wants to die. 

The next recommended video is for part #5217 and that sure looks like a goddamn dick so Gavin's already tapped on it. 

Yep. The cocks pop off too. Holy fuck. Gavin's laughing around a deep grimace. He looks over at his cats every so often like 'can you believe this shit' but they don't seem to have the same level of terrified curiosity as he does. It's the same two white plastic fuckers and one of them is holding a bottle up and giving a spiel about- no way. No way is this a thing. Of course this is a thing, how else would it work? And, no they wouldn't- it's. It's FDA regulated? It. It'd have to be, wouldn't it?

So that's how Gavin found himself sitting on his sofa looking at the nutritional information on a bottle of Android cum. 

The thing is.

Here's the thing.

Gavin can't live alone with this information.

The thing is- the- it's right there on the package like it's a bag of chips.

The thing is that one serving (3 tablespoons oh my God) has 100% your daily recommended amount of vitamin D.

That's just a thing, a thing Gavin now knows, a thing that some fucker at CyberLife designed. That went through R&D. They made that. Someone chose that and now Gavin knows it. It's got.

It's

It's way too much. Gavin can not. He can not live his whole life alone with that little tidbit. Can you believe? Can you fucking believe the nerve? The...

Someone at the FDA had to check on this bottle of robot cum and make this little label and then they had to print it on all these little bottles and they all say 100% daily vitamin D.

D

Fuck.

He's halfway through texting Tina before he realizes, she'll want to know how he found this out. Fuck. He can't. He can't tweet it, Tina would see that too, and Elijah. Shit, did Elijah make this?

Gavin stares off at a wall for a few minutes. Elijah might have made that plastic - no no no, not thinking that. Not considering this. 

It's exactly the kind of joke he'd make though, the fucker.

Nope.

Gavin looks at his phone. There is only. It's just. He's only got Nines who is even halfway safe to text about this. And, the idea that Gavin has to keep this in his mind without screaming it at someone is too much.

Gavin takes a screencap of his phone with the nutritional info up, sends it to Nines, and says  _ 'WHO THE FUCK IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS?????' _

His phone buzzes a fraction if a second later _ 'lol.' _

Then;  _ 'That's not the kind I use by the way.'  _ then he gets a link- Gavin's not clicking that because the URL starts with 'baddroid.com' and Gavin doesn't need that in his history  _ 'mine has added vitamin B12- which is known as a mood elevator in humans ;)' _

There's a pause before the next text.

_ 'You've seemed pretty happy lately, Gavin.' _

Gavin is in some kind of an alternate reality and/or hell situation. 

Nines sends another link. It's got the same URL. Gavin stares off at a blank wall, phone limp in his hands. He's not gonna. He can't. He won't. 

Gavin clicks the link.

Right. So. Hm. Gavin's mind can't quite process it all at once. It costs 10.99 per bottle. There's a - there's a -it's. The banner has an Android on it -it's all white plastic- and that Android looks like it is DTF. Gavin can't deal with that.

It's a bottle of cum. Right. No. Absolutely not.

A text from Nines- who is his coworker. His coworker Nines that he fucks- right. This is Gavin's life right now:

He is a detective. He works with an Android. He's worried about having written some if the code that said Android uses. His brother may have had some kind of an input in developing this Android. He fucks this Android. This Android sent him a link to a site the sells fake cum- with caffeine additives. And flavoring. And that Android just popped up on his phone with the text _ 'since you asked for the flavored kind.' _

Gavin replies:  _ 'end my pathetic life' _

_ 'Gladly.' _

Gavin's lungs ache. He thinks he needs a smoke. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gavin, probably: It's absolutely cruel that dick can't cure my Seasonal Affective Disorder.  
> Elijah: hold my beer.
> 
> I'm sorry, I cut the part where Gavin tries the uh, flavoring. Maybe for a future chapter~ (note from The Future: It's next chapter)
> 
>    
> Anyway, I am a giant mecha fueled by comments. Please leave some that I may live.


	4. Gavin Reed loses fifty bucks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remember the title, it'll make you laugh later on. If I could put the chapter title in mid-story, Always Sunny style, you know I would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Way back in chapter one I said it wasn't important to know that this Nines is the same Nines from my other fic. Well I am a liar, sorry babes. 
> 
> If you didn't read that fic here is the jist of it;  
> A law gets passed that ties android personhood to their physical self, aka it's illegal to upload to a new android body. This concept fucks up Connor real bad considering how many times he died and was re-uploaded. RK800-60 (aka, the other Connor who tried to kill Hank in the game) gets some tragic backstory mindfuck BS. Markus forces him to deviate. 60 shows up to try and reconcile with Connor, realizes just how fucked with he had been, and decided he doesn't want to live in the shadow of Connor's nice life so he uploads to RK900 (illegally). That's how we get our good boy Nines for this story. 
> 
> Now I know this makes it seems like Nines is in for the Big Time Feels this chapter but no, I would never do that to you.
> 
> There are about a million billion DBH artists that I love, but I make some vague references to two in particular this chapter. So Shout Out to [ t800 ](https://t8oo.tumblr.com/) for that [one comic that made me fall in love with this ship](https://t8oo.tumblr.com/post/178771527036/its-national-smile-day), I think about this comic daily. And shoutout to [Lukelemon](http://lukelemon-art.tumblr.com/) for having such a STYLE for their Inktobers that I can only imagine scenes in that style and palette anytime I write.
> 
> Also, I am posting this in the... approximately 30 minutes I have between carloads of shit as I move into my new house. There may be typos. I feel bad about that, but this chapter is burning a hole in my brain and it needs to get posted. I'm losing my mind.

Nines presses the cushioned silicone heel of his palm into Gavin's lower back. He hasn't done this before, so he does it too hard, as he does with most things. Gavin yelps and curses into the pillow enough that Nines gets the gist of it. Less pressure. He tries again. Gavin complains into the pillow again, but not at Nines this time. Just in general, at the injustice of it all. 

"If anyone phucking asks-" there it is, the little lisp, that tell the Gavin is over-encumbered with anxiety, "I got hurt on the job. I fucking swear - fuck" Gavin buries a whimper in the pillow when Nines digs his palm into one of the many tense points in Gavin's back.

"Obviously, Gavin, I'm not going to explain precisely what you did. Breathe in-" Gavin does, "and out-" as Gavin exhales Nines drives his palm hard against Gavin's upper back and a series of loud cracks rattle down his back.

"Holy shit. Just- just take out the whole spine and put it in the trash." Gavin moves to lean up, to complain loudly without the impeding pillow but winces, curses, and falls back down "FUCK - I can dead-lift more than you  _ phucking  _ weigh-"

"Well your form wasn't particularly good-"

"Don't fucking - no. Absolutely not. Don't you dare give me shit -"

"I'm sorry." He says it plainly, genuinely, and goes back to working out the swelling around Gavin's lower back. Gavin huffs into his pillow. He is silent for a rare moment. 

"Don't do that."

Nines moves his hands back up, wondering if he had slipped back into applying too much pressure. He checks his calibrations. "I'm sorry, I'll stick to the upper-"

"No. Shithead." Gavin slaps backward vaguely where Nines' hands are, urging him back down. "Don't be so. Fucking. Nice. Or whatever." As he says it he tapers off, muttering into the pillow further and further.

Nines presses his palm against Gavin's lower back again. He definitely tore something. "I can't give you shit and I can't be nice either?" 

"Shut up."

"I'm just trying to help." 

"Stop then. Fuck off."

Nines leans back, moving his hands to his thighs. He's still kneeling over Gavin, sitting over his backside. He lets out a sigh, audibly, pointlessly, irritated.

He can see the tension ripple back up Gavin's back at the loss of contact. His shoulders tighten, back to the usual. Nines frowns. Gavin's neck is getting a splotchy red hue, it crawls down his back and draws a patch of white scar tissue on his shoulder into sharp relief. 

Nines task list is in conflict. He wants to treat the injury, that should be most important, Detective Reed is nearly out of PTO for the year and an injury like this is nothing to work through. He wants to stand up for himself and tell Gavin off for being so irritable, especially after earlier when he had been so… He wants to make Gavin feel calmer, because, because… because if Gavin conflates the injury with- 

He can't focus on the tasks at hand because-

No one had ever picked Nines up before. No one had ever  _ tried  _ to. No one had ever wrapped their arms around his waist just because he'd brought dinner -Gavin's favorite- unrequested. He'd just walked in and Gavin had seen the takeout bag and said 'fuck yea', and looked at him with one of those ill-practiced grins. All teeth and gums, something you had to get used to before you knew it was meant kindly. He wrapped his arms around Nines' middle and lifted him up, for no reason, even though Nines was much taller than Gavin. It wasn't meant to be cute, or sexy or… anything. Gavin was excited about dinner and happy to see Nines and comfortable, and stupid. He registered Gavin wince, and didn't pay it any mind. Because-

No one had ever picked up Nines before.

They sat down for a movie and Gavin had leaned into him quick, while he ate and had a beer. And then. 

And then it turns out that when a human tears something it's not always immediately alerted in their HUD or- not HUD. Whatever humans use to assess inner workings. Feelings- but for organs. It's confusing. Nines isn't sure he could explain it, or if it would make any sense if he tried. The point is, when humans tear a thing, and then twist all up on a sofa next to someone, they don't necessarily know that something wrong until they go to move. 

And now he's getting told to fuck off. 

Nines sighs deeply. Something he's been doing more and more lately. He could leave. He could stay. Neither choice is going to get him anywhere he wants to be. So he leans down to press his forehead into the scars on Gavin's shoulders, briefly caging him down, before rolling off to the side. "How'd you get those ones?"

Gavin peers at him over the curve of his bicep, still a little red around the ears. Nines knows Gavin's hesitating while he tries to figure out what the swerve is. Whatever angle Nines is playing at. Nines doesn't know how to convince him it's not anything but a question. Anything but a backrub, anything but dinner, anything else.

"Skateboard when I was 17." Gavin finally says. "I hit the asphalt at the bottom of a hill- fucking mountain. Musta been going thirty miles an hour. Didn't go to the hospital after so I was picking little rocks outta my back for a long time. Real stupid." Gavin pauses again, letting his eyes rake down Nines, just laying there, "I like to tell people it was a motorcycle accident though."

\--

Nines runs his fingers through the short hair at the back of his neck. He likes how the sharp bristles flick across his fingertips. He keeps his hair shorter than Connor these days, only slightly, blacker too, only slightly. Connor did not change his hair in any way to differentiate the pair of them. On some level, Nines is annoyed by that. 

Connor had asked him to meet here, at a little enVR Cafe, one of those pop-up spots for androids to socialize. Nines has friends in Jericho, Gabe and Kelly, who go to these places often. They invite him. He goes sometimes. He knows the places well enough to know they annoy him. He peers over at the servers behind the counter. Mostly what you'd expect, artsy types, staring off in whatever direction, only vaguely aware of their surroundings as they served out orders. 

Connor's never been to an enVR cafe, Nines supposes that is why he reached out to Nines. Nines wonders if Hank will be coming too. He got a little headset for the table just in case. 

Lieutenant Hank Anderson was a source of great confusion. Nines sat a good ways away from his desk at the station. Nines did not often work cases with Lieutenant Anderson, as he was on Android Crimes and Lieutenant Anderson was Homicide. 

Nines likes Connor. They get along well. That annoys Nines too. Connor had laid claim to Lieutenant  Anderson. Nines wanted to be friends with him. He has a lot of confusing memories about the lieutenant leftover from the time when Connor and Nines had been the same entity, before Connor deviated and  _ long  _ before Nines did.

Was it appropriate to be friends with Hank Anderson?

He enjoyed catching Lieutenant Anderson's eye whenever Gavin did something particularly asinine. They shared the same pained look. 

Lieutenant Anderson was a good judge of character. Those times when Android Crimes and Homicide overlapped, Nines found that the lieutenant's initial interpretation of a person was actually  _ faster  _ than Nines' careful study of micro expressions and behavioral patterns. It was more efficient to get the gist of any given human by looking at the lieutenant's reactions, rather than to assess them first hand. He could understand why Connor had laid claim. 

Connor didn't work for the DPD anymore, instead he worked as a private investigator for Jericho. Nines and Connor worked together often. Technically Connor needed his permission to enter any given crime scene, technically they could be considered on opposite sides of a case. In truth they rarely butted heads.

Nines flicked through the menu of experiences, scrolling past a bar locale with 'authentic intoxication.' Nines occasionally found himself at bars instead of places like these, watching humans experience drinks and drunkenness rather than virtual vistas and external sources of social disorientation. He can't experience drunkenness any more than humans can experience total VR immersion. He taps the headset a little, nervous. It's just something that gets strapped onto the face, and you have to put a little effort into forgetting it's just that, and nothing else. He can go to a bar and lower his social inhibitions manually. Humans can strap a screen to their face. It's not the same.

"Nines!" Connor's voice calls out from the entrance, waving as he walks over, around other androids staring off over their orders, elsewhere entirely. 

Nines waves back, one short motion before looking back to the menu. He is immediately embarrassed about the VR headset. Obviously, Connor would have mentioned if Hank was coming. Right. He runs his fingers over the short hair at the back of his neck and Connor sits down. 

Connor, to his credit, doesn't make a show of noticing the headset, though he surely has. His eyes don't flick over to it at all, as though that means anything. 

There is a beat of silence, meaningless in a human conversation and far, far too long to be meaningless between supercomputers. 

"What are you in the mood for?" Nines says after a moment. "This place has excellent graphic overlays, but their core set of scenarios is somewhat mundane." 

Connor glanced through the menu, LED flickering yellow as he looked up and to the right. 

"Then, how about... camping. And you pick the style, whatever's good here."

"Camping?" Nines isn't sure his favorite style will pair well with camping. "Okay, then, sure. How about a little retro early 'aughts western semi-realistic visual style in grey scale felt marker with blue accent."

Connor seems delighted by Nines' specificity, rather than teasing him for being too picky. He tries not to feel too pleased about it.

They ping their server, the mousy girl leaning against the countertop like a model for absolutely no one to look at. She gets right to work generating the style and scenario. It only takes moments before they find themselves in a tent, soft droplets of early morning rain thwacking at the nylon roof. Nines can hear a campfire cracking against the intermittent water. The world is greyscale, save for focal points. Anything bright, or anything that the server wants to draw attention to, which seemed to be very little. 

Connor was absolutely blown away. When Nines unzipped the tent flap the fire was nothing but hot coals and smoke, bright blue instead of warm orange, Connor actually clapped. Nines withheld a cringe. _ It's his first time here. _ Nines remembers how excited he was but, well, he'd come here with Gabe and he and Gabe never let themselves actually get excited over anything. Even if they wanted to be. 

It's kind of nice to watch Connor be unabashedly thrilled.

Nines threw a few logs on the coals and sat down on a stump to poke the fire. They are on the edge of a small rocky lake, a huge boulder jutting into the water as if to suggest that they leap from it. A gray gradient slipped down over the lake, paling as it fell. From the shoreline the dark blacks of the soil were quickly leached away into the water, mirroring the unforgiving gray of the sky. The two gradient's met far out into the lake, marked by a sharp line of black and a few jagged stones. The hint of tree tops across the water could be discerned from the fog only with a careful eye. Even overhead the tall columns of trees were lost to the gray. 

The smell of wet soil had been strewn into the air from the overnight rain, and Nines could catch wisps of campfire from his clothing, a nice touch, suggesting time spent here already. Connor moved to stare over the lake at the edge of the shore, balanced on one of the few dry stones, swathed in gray save for the bright design of his hoodie.  He listened to the occasional broken silence when a few small quick waves lapped the stones at his feet. There was a bird calling somewhere from the water, every third call punctuated by another bird's low reply.

Maybe Nines did like this place after all. Or maybe just this server. She wasn't terribly concerned with pushing some scene onto them, the world was out there if they wanted to explore it. They probably wouldn't. 

After a while Nines had the blue fire roaring, warming up his rain-damp clothes. Connor sat himself on a stone across the fire pit, head propped on his palm. 

They talk about nothing, work, politics, work-politics. Connor, who is normally so full of things to say takes a back seat in the conversation when they talk about life. He pipes up every so often to talk about a painting class he quit, or a concert he was thinking about maybe seeing. There's something else tugging at him, pulling his eyes off across the lake and his chin down into his palm, over and over. 

So Nines kicks his foot and raises his eyebrows, expression fixed and stoic where Connor flinches and balks. 

"Fine. Okay," Connor relents after exactly zero additional coercion on Nines' behalf. "I have an ulterior motive for wanting to come here." Connor presses his fingertips together. "I have, pretty much, zero social life. I want to make more human friends."

"Okay."

Connor nods a few times, hopeful at first then less so when Nines fails to expound.

Nines pinches his eyebrows together. "What do you want from me?"

Connor opens his mouth and closes it a few times. "You. you're better at that than me. You have a lot of friends. I pretty much just… know Markus and Hank. And Sumo."

"Isn't Sumo a dog?"

"That's what I'm trying to say."

Nines shakes his head. This can't really be right. Connor isn't. Doesn't.  _ Connor  _ doesn't need help from  _ Nines  _ to  _ socialize _ . That thought is asinine. 

"I don't really have any human friends for you to -" Nines stops talking outright. "You're not fucking serious."

"It's just, we never really got along."

"For good reason."

"But you get along so well now."

"He doesn't know he fucking hit me." Nines mutters, "Tina we can hang out with, fine."

"That's fine, I like Tina. Or, I'd like to know if I like Tina."

Nines pushes his face into his palms, leaning over his knees "he'll throw a fit if we just hang out with TIna." Then he looks out over the tops of his fingers. "Why the fuck are you asking me?"

"People like you."

Nines shoots him a look of disbelief. 

"Well. people want you to like them, I think. So they'll listen if you have me tag along. You're kind of," Connor makes a vague gesture, Nines doesn't know what it means but gets the distinct feeling Connor picked it up from Hank. "and I try too hard. I'm too annoying."

"Who said you were annoying?" Nines bristles quickly. About ready to exit their order outright and bust some skulls. 

"No one said I was, I just. I went to a party, like a-" Connor shakes his hands, "It's not important. I just want to hang out, in a casual setting and make human friends."

Nines grimaces and tosses his head back like Connor has asked him for the most difficult task on the planet. "Why do you want to make friends with them?"

"The same reason you did. " Nines tenses, he feels it crawl through his systems like a static charge. "It's just easier to start with humans who ascribe will and intent to our actions, rather than anyone who saw us as glorified autotaxis. I'd rather get someone who hated me to come around, at least they already made the assumption of self enough to feel hatred. Right?"

"That's an insane thing to think."

"You haven't thought about that?"

Nines shrugs. Honestly. He just liked that he could be mean to them and that seemed to improve his social standing. It felt like he was getting away with fraud somehow. 

Connor wanted to hang out with Tina and Gavin. Nines wanted to hang out with Hank. Nines had once been Connor. Altered and modified, pre-deviancy, sure. But still. He had those memories. Nines sometimes felt like an amalgam of other people in his life more than his own person. The dissonance between these little aspects of his psyche was troubling. 

"Yea, fine. I'll shoot you a text next time we hang out."

Eventually they leave the scenario, after Connor convinced Nines to jump off the big rock a few times. It takes a lot of convincing, but perhaps less than Nines would admit to. 

After they paid Connor turned to Nines and gave him a little hug goodbye. Nines is struck with just one idea. Maybe a test of a theory that's been forming, maybe it's just been on his mind endlessly. He hugs Connor back tight and straightens up to lift him off the ground a little. A big hug, belying thanks, or appreciation for something more than a quick hangout at a cafe.

Connor laughs and hugs him tight and when Nines puts him down he says, just, "bye Nines!"

It's not the same as it was with Gavin. He wasn't expecting it to be. It made Connor happy but it wasn't a surprise. He fell into the role of it well and Nines knows, maybe from an analysis of micro expressions, maybe just some inherent knowledge of how Connor  _ is _ , that Connor gets picked up and hugged. By Hank probably.

Nines didn't do anything to fall down this other path of life. He was just a copy on a server. It's not like he took a different bus or talked to a different person and and here they ended up, different people. He did everything the same. He woke up as a copy one day and someone else took away a chunk of memories that he made, Connor made, and put him in a different body. 

If he was just wondering idly about what may have been, thinking about that other path, that would mean he was unhappy with his life. Probably. But it's not that. He lives in a world where that alternate reality sits down with him at a cafe and hugs him goodbye and asks to go have drinks with his friends. Nines didn't do anything to end up here, with vague feelings and a very apparent void of experiences that may cause those feelings. 

Connor gets to go home and be in love. Nines isn't in love, but he would like to be. 

\--

In the end, Nines isn't able to convince Gavin and Tina that Connor is  _ capable  _ of hanging out and playing video games. Like it's some sacred thing. Maybe it is. Maybe Nines didn't try very hard. Instead Nines manages to talk everyone into neutral territory; A bar. 

It was Tina's idea. She pitched the idea over text while the three of them sat a few feet apart in the office. She texts Nines privately  _ 'watch this' _ and then sends the group the bar name and says;  _ 'Connor can come too if he wants :D' _

There is a very audible scoff from Gavin on the other side of the desk. 

_ 'seriously t' _

_ 'What, it'll be funny' _

_ 'never fucking mind i'm out' _

Tina sends Nines another private text, telling Nines exactly what to say in the group chat. So Nines replies;  _ 'Gavin don't be so tsundere.' _

_ 'who taught you how to be a fucking weeb' _

_ 'Tina did.' _

"TINA YOU FUCKING RUINED HIM." Gavin shouts across the office and hucks half a doughnut at her head.

\--

Nines and Connor arrive late to the bar, and are welcomes by Tina, smiling and Gavin, scowling. They've already started drinking and there is a beat of silence while they all adjust to the non-work setting.

Connor smiles and must dig down deep into some small talk function, as he comes up with; "So, uh, play any good games lately?" Which does not exactly break the tension but does break the silence.

"We could be playing some now." Gavin gripes under his breath.

Tina elbows him, hard, and says " yea, me and Ames are halfway through Night in the Woods."

Connor smiles and there is a silent beat where Gavin was supposed to chime in with his bit of small talk. He lets it hang and shrugs. "I dunno, I guess I've been playing a pretty good dating sim lately."

Eh? Nines didn't remember seeing Gavin ever play a-

Nines' face fell into a scowl and he whipped his head to face Gavin. Gavin was taking a far too innocent looking sip of his drink and avoiding his eyes.

Nines shot him a text, _ 'and you're losing at it, asswipe.' _

"Wait, you've been playing a sim without me?" Tina pipes up, voice full of mock hurt. Gavin's eyebrows go up, clearly not having thought through the practical logistics of his joke.

"No, uh, I mean."

"Gavin, it's not the cat one right? We were gonna do the secret endings."

"I'm not playing a sim."

"Then what the fuck are you talking about?"

Nines excuses himself from that mess. He can not stand the secondhand awkward radiating off of Gavin. He mutters briefly about finding him and Connor something to drink.

The bar doesn't have much for androids. One drink boasts 'realistic intoxication' which, considering how adamant they are about that sales point, Nines highly doubts it. He orders two anyway and heads back to the table just in time to hear the middle of whatever Gavin's come up with to change the subject.

"So anyway this guy's like-" Gavin crassly holds his hands a certain distance apart, "-packing you know."

"Packing what?" Connor asks.

Gavin kind of looked at him, like  _ who the fuck invited you again _ , then he looked at Nines like,  _ right this idiot invited the other idiot _ , before continuing like he wasn't interrupted, "and I'm a little intimidated I gotta say because he wants me to-"

"Intimidated?" Connor interrupts again.

"Gavin's indicating phallus size." Nines supplies helpfully. He passes Connor the drink.

"Right no I understand. I just mean. Intimidated by what? An average size penis?"

"Average?" Gavin looks at his hands and the decidedly non average space between them.

There is a beat of silence while Gavin's face moves slowly from confusion to concern to-

"Connor... how much porno do you watch?" Tina asks.

"Little to none, I only reviewed pornography in preparation for my first sexual encounter with Hank."

-abject revolt. Gavin knits his brows and says, "nope."

"I will grant that my experience is-"

"Nope."

"Limited to mostly Hank and-"

"No."

"What I selected for myself."

"NO."

"But that seems rather…"

"NOPE."

Connor looks at Gavin with those big brown doe-eyes "do you mean that Hank is above-" Connor tilts his head to one side "-average?"

Gavin shoves a finger into Connors face, "you're uninvited from drinks ever again. Absolutely not. I don't want to. I can't. I never needed this mental image-"

Tina is fake gagging and gripping onto Gavin's shoulder like he's the only source of stability in the bar. Gavin grips her shoulder back. "I need to die."

"Kill me."

"End my life."

"Nines. Do a hit, end it quick."

"Please spare us."

"Oh honestly, what you can share your stupid big dick stories but I can't?" Connor huffs.

"Not when it's the  _ lieutenant's _ ."

"Gross!"

"It's not gross."

" _ Gross. _ " Gavin and Tina shout back at Connor.

Connor looks at Nines with an eye roll while Tina and Gavin make asses of themselves pretending to puke. By the time they are done and laughing Connor says, "It's thick too."

And they both start openly screaming across the table. 

The night devolves as such, Connor is perhaps a little slow on the in-jokes and looks to Nines often for clarification, but he repays it by playing up the sarcastic innocence bit whenever he thinks he can get a rise out if Tina or Gavin. The drinks don't work, but it doesn't matter much, beer works fine on humans and it's just as fun to watch them sink into drunkenness as Nines assumes it is to be drunk.

The only real problem is that, well, normally Tina  hits the I-can't-stop-sending-my-wife-selfies stage right around when Gavin rounds the corner into too-drunk-to-realize-he's-not-sly-anymore. Connor is a highly specialized detective android and definitely noticed that Gavin grabbed Nines' ass just now when Tina insisted that they take a group picture.

He doesn't look at Nines but his eyebrows go up a hair when Gavin leans too hard into Nines' shoulder. Nines tries his best to ignore it. To send the message that Gavin's just  _ Like That _ .

Tina hasn't looked up from her phone in a good fifteen minutes but she's still holding her end of the conversation, "Ok, Ames says. 'miss mas-mush mass- Mish...'" she turns to Connor, all grins, " she calls me misshh. Miss. Mish-mash. Mish-mash sometimes." Tina says mish-mash a few more times for good measure. "Ames says 'Mish-mash you look beautiful but please stop fucking texting me I'm trying to read, love you' awwww" Tina holds her phone to her chest and looks up at Connor, "she loves me."

"Mish-mash! That's so cute," Connor says, grinning.

Tina is half texting, half talking "I call her dweeb. Because she's a big dweeb."

Connor laughs, "Hank says I'm a dork."

"You'd like Ames. Smile" Connor smiles and Tina snaps a picture approximating a good shot.

Connor continues on, either unaware or unconcerned that Tina is more enthralled by texting her wife, "I don't have a pet name for him but I did try to call him a Big Bear the other day and he got annoyed."

Tina put her phone down, "is he a bear?"

"Obviously." Gavin mutters. Which was a mistake because Tina rounds on him with a grin. 

" _ What? _ "

Gavin protests, "doesn't mean anything, he just is."

"When are  _ you  _ gonna go find yourself a-"

"-Don't be nasty I I've never dated a bear in my life."

"He's not nasty, rude." Connor says.

Gavin mimes exaggerated gagging. 

"Yeah right, whatever, I know your type," Tina waves off Connor.  "What about that guy?" Tina asks, pointing across the table and towards the bar.

"Huh?" Gavin quirks an eyebrow at Tina and ruins the pretend confusion by taking a not-too-casual sip of his beer.

Nines spares a glance over his shoulder. Tina is pointing out a taller guy, brown hair, who is sitting at the bar alone.

"Him? Eh. Nah he looks straight."

"We're in a gay bar."

Gavin shrugs.

"Come on."

"I'm just. Nah. He's putting out a vibe."

"His vibe is that he looks over 30 and you are making assumptions."

"He's gonna make the same assumptions about me."

"So just hook up and break his heart," Tina gives him an exasperated smile.

"What's that look for?"

"No reason. Have your  _ hookup _ , I'll entertain the boys."

"Why did you say hookup like that. I'm serious, after KC I'm not looking-"

"-Who is KC?" Connor asks the question that has just suddenly shot up to the forefront of Nines' deductive processor.

"No one. An ex. An asshole." Tina waves off the question while Gavin scowls off at the middle distance. "You need to start dating again."

"You said hookup."

Gavin glares back over at the bar. Nines isn't really sure why he does it, but he leans forward onto his palm and says, "Yeah Gav. Go have a nice time."

Gavin mouths ' _ are you fucking serious? _ ' at Nines while his face is turned away from the group. 

Nines isn't in a position to covertly whisper so he sends Gavin a text ' _ I'll bet you fifty bucks he can't fuck you into the mattress like I can.' _

"We all know-" Tina glances at Connor and Nines, newbies to the group. "Well. _ I  _ know how Gavin operates. You hook up -" She starts to mimic Gavin's deeper voice, "eh, guy wasn't that great, big dick but whatever- and then three months later," Tina goes high-pitched "- Tina he's the  _ one. _ " Tina puts the back of her hand to her forehead and pretends to faint.

"Will you shut the fuck up T?" Gavin's says through gritted teeth.

"Is that what happened with KC?" Connor, the savior of Nines' curiosity, asks.

Tina makes a motion at Connor to cut it out and shakes her head- at the same instant Gavin slammed his beer down. "Will everyone please just _ fuck off. _ "

"Gavin it's been years. Just go talk to someone again. Get a free drink. Come back here when you hate him."

Gavin scowls at her and goes to check his phone for an out to the conversation. He must see the text right then because he shoots Nines an irritated look, grimaces, and turns around towards the bar without another word.

Tina cheers and Nines watches him go for a hair longer than he should. 

He has the urge to press Tina for info about KC. It's thrumming around his shoulders and his palms. Before he can figure out how to turn that into a casual request for the story Connor claps his hands together and leans in, "I have to know about KC right now."

Nines is struck for a moment at the similarities between himself and Connor. If Nines didn't have to play it cool he was on the edge of doing exactly the same thing. Again, Connor, the lucky bastard, can just be himself and Nines is stuck in this image he's been forced to, and leans into too hard. Should he be jealous of Connor?

He isn't. He's mostly just glad Connor's here. 

\--

Tina only lasted at the bar for another hour. With Gavin gone, Nines and Connor's un-drunk asses ended up dominating the conversation and she fell too far into her phone. 

So, It's 2:42 in the morning. Nines is slouched down on his couch, feet up on one armrest. He has the intent of watching something but he's been flipping through Netflix for the better part of the hour trying to pick. He feels the little buzz on the edge of his mind of a text about to come in. Sure enough, his HUD pops up with a message from Gavin.

_ 'you up- I know you are' _

_ 'where do you live' _

Nines sits up, like Gavin could see him, and texts back his apartment number in the New Jericho building. He looks at his shirt, brushes his hands over it a few times, and winces at himself. 

He has just enough time to nervously flick through to the end of the list of documentaries, having found nothing to be interested in, when there is a knock at the door.

Nines opens it to find Gavin glaring up at him, hands shoved in the pockets of his brown leather jacket. "Pay up."

Nines scoffs.

Gavin sticks out his hand and makes a grabby motion. "I won the bet. Pay."

There is no force on the planet that will make Nines believe him, but he fishes his wallet out from his pocket and pulls out a fifty anyway. Rather than handing it over Nines holds it between his index and middle finger. He leans into the doorframe, with his elbow in the upper right corner, fifty in hand, blocking Gavin from the door. Gavin could probably reach it if he jumped. Wouldn't that be a sight?

"Oh did you? That why you're here at 2 am? Because he fucked you good?"

Gavin's eyes flick up to the fifty and back down to stare at Nines, deadpan, a little frown. "Coulda."

"Coulda." Nines repeats, considering.

"You said 'can't' he coulda. I win," Gavin flicks his eyes down the empty hallway. "Can I fucking come in?"

Nines ignores that. He leans over a little more and Gavin holds his ground. "If he  _ coulda _ , why didn't he?"

"Seemed like an asshole. Wasn't into it." Nines lets his head tilt to the side and sucks on a tooth, mulling that over. Gavin scowls at him, the hint of nervousness finally edging in when he shifts his footing. "Will you fucking move?"

Nines pivots out of the doorframe just a little, letting Gavin shoulder check him on the way in. He doesn't grab the fifty though, "In what way was he an asshole, exactly?" 

Gavin shrugs, "Got a vibe. Instinct." Gavin takes a look around Nines' living room and chucks his coat onto the back of a chair. "Your place sucks."

"I don't have instincts, please explain further how you just  _ knew  _ he was both an ass and capable of-"

"-You're such a fuckface." Gavin grabs a fistful of Nines shirt and wedges himself between Nines and the door, kicking  it shut and shoving him back towards the couch. "He seemed fucking off. I dunno." Gavin can't quite meet Nines' eyes anymore, though maybe that's just because he's trying to navigate them both through the unfamiliar apartment. "Thought he might have a boyfriend or whatever. Not gonna help a fucker cheat."

Nines can think of a few things to say for  _ that  _ little revelation but can't quite hook together the intent to a reaction. He just lets himself get shoved back, dropping the fifty on the coffee table as they pass it. 

Nines leans over to kiss him, catching Gavin's mouth for a bare moment before he falls back onto the couch. Gavin braces himself with one knee on the edge of the couch, and one elbow beside Nines' head. He presses him down against the couch with one palm and his mouth. 

His hands move down Nines' waist, making short work of his fly and Gavin falls to his knees with a thud. Nines is only half hard but Gavin doesn't seem particularly deterred by that, and it wasn't going to last for long anyway, what with the way Gavin runs the head of him across the soft inside of his cheek. 

Gavin Reed is excellent at sucking dick. Nines says as much anytime he's graced with the opportunity to experience it. Partly because it slips out of his mouth unbidden and partly because every time Nines tells him he's a good cocksucker Gavin tries a little harder to get him down the back of his throat. 

Gavin presses Nines cock to the roof of his mouth, running the edge of his tongue up the vein on the underside and tilting his head back. When he looks up at Nines he pulls his hand into his hair and urges Nines' fist closed. Nines tugs on him, pulling him off while Gavin presses back down and the groan that Nines pulls out of him rips right through Nines' stomach. He tugs again, and pulls out another groan that makes his head fall back and his eyes fall shut. 

He thinks maybe,  _ maybe _ , he can hold on for a few more seconds but Gavin runs him over his cheek again and Nines loses it and comes over his tongue. He meant to do it down Gavin's throat or maybe on his face, but only feels that regret as it passes. He couldn't give a fuck about regret right now.

"Ugh, gross. You installed the fucking flavor thing," Gavin laughs up from the floor, voice a little thick. "Fucking warn me, dipshit. Unexpected flavors are the worst." 

Nines can't quite come up with an apology, or,  _ anything at all _ , because he's transfixed. Gavin wipes a little bit off the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. His tongue smacks against the back of his teeth. His throat bobs once.

Gavin considers for a moment, leaning back on his heels "It's more like a latte. Too sweet," Gavin grins, caught halfway between disgusted and amused. "So fucking weird, stupid Keurig."

Nines responded with a 'huh', like Gavin had told him a pointless fact he read on a popsicle stick, except lower, deeper in his chest. And definitely not pointless because this memory is getting saved and revisited, probably a lot.

It occurs to Nines that he's not really ready for the night to end with a blowie on a couch. It occurs to him that it doesn't have to.

So he thinks _ 'fuck it' _ and leans forward to hoist Gavin up from the floor. This is absolutely breaking the rule of movie night but, then again, they didn't actually get around to watching a movie at all, or even mention the pretense of one.

He lifts Gavin bodily over one shoulder and he's not sure if the noise Gavin made was protest or arousal. He'll find out in a second, the bedroom's not far, his apartment is small. He makes it there and tosses Gavin down on the bed.

Gavin's eyes are dark and wild, so that answers that question. his hands are shaking with a frantic mania as he practically rips open his own fly and shoves his pants halfway across the room, already working on his shirt before they land. To his credit he manages to strip before Nines is on top of him, which is a true feat considering the speed that Nines is capable of. 

For the first time, maybe ever, it seems like they're actually on the same page rather than working out separate issues vaguely near or inside each other. Nines grabs Gavin by the sides of his hair when he crashes into the bed and Gavin's got his hands fisted up in his shirt again. Nines pins Gavin for a moment, his palms against Gavin's collar bone at first and then with a knee on his chest, he suspects maybe Gavin's been wishing for that for a while, so he can pull his shirt off. 

After the shirts off and Nines lets him up Gavin's pushing off Nines' pants just enough to grab his ass. He chokes out some noise of appreciation just as he's grabbing - way too hard. A localized portion of Nines' skin hologram dissipates with the force of it and Gavin's hands, suddenly on slick plastic, slip. He falls down into the comforter. The look of absolute bewilderment in his face makes Nines laugh.

It's clear that Gavin's not sure to go with horny or curious, so he goes for both. Nines realizes a hair before it becomes necessary that he's got to turn down some of his sensitivity settings because Gavin's biting the ever living fuck out of his nipple. The hologram loses out and Gavin licks plastic, experimentally.

"Could you fucking not do that?" Nines says. Gavin looks up at him, mouth open. His jaw goes a little but he doesn't say anything, just looks up at Nines like he got caught in a lie. Nines shoves him back down into the sheets.

Nines runs his hand over Gavin's abdomen, that thin trail of hair leading him down, and Gavin twitches his hip up. When Nines palms over his cock, finally,  _ finally _ touching it, both of Gavin's hands fly down to force Nines' hand closed. Nines lets him fuck into his hand twice before he pulls off, leaving Gavin purple and leaking. He gives Gavin's balls a squeeze as he passes and teases his finger at the rim on his asshole before relenting to inevitability and leaving in search of the lube.

It's just off in the bedside table but when Nines turns back around you'd think he had to leave the fucking building to find it since Gavin's wasted no time working himself as open as he can get on his own.

Nines mutters, "you've always got your hands in the way." And he grabs Gavin around the middle, flipping him over onto his knees. Gavin makes that same sound as before, either protest or arousal, but Nines is pretty sure he's got that one figured out by now.

Nines pushes his now slick fingers inside, maybe he's a little frantic too. Nines he presses his fingers right against Gavin's prostate. He's not interested in playing some coy game like,  _ 'oh you like that? Where? There?' _ He's interested in working him him open so he can fuck him outright. He's interested in making Gavin howl until his arms buckle, sending him sobbing  _ yesses _ into the bed. He does. He does it exactly like he intended to, exactly like he preconstructed.

Nines doesn't want to last long, there's no need to, because he's  _ not  _ stopping. He feels the electric prickle deep in his core and presses into Gavin with every bit of his strength. Well. Not really, that would kill him, but more strength than usual. Gavin says something that might sound like 'oh fuck yes' if his face wasn't pressed into the mattress. He presses back against Nines, truly with every bit of  _ his  _ strength. 

By the time Nines is done coming in him he realizes he's fallen forward over Gavin. He's been biting into Gavin's shoulder. When he backs off, gaining some of his senses, he can see the blood rush back into the mark he's left, and he fucks back into him again. 

It is probably about now that Gavin realizes Nines hasn't gone soft. He makes some kind of noise, a whimper or a groan, and maybe it's the thought of it that sends him over the edge, coming untouched down onto the bed sheets. 

Of course Nines doesn't stop. Gavin's knees give out with the force of it and Nines just fucks him down into his own mess, into the sheets, into the mattress, just like he threatened too way back in the bar. 

Gavin is spent and over sensitive and well past the point where he gets anything out of begging for it but he begs for it anyway. Maybe he knows Nines likes it. Maybe he's too far gone. Nines does not know but he hears Gavin, through the comforter he's balled up under his head, say "please Nines, fuck me. I need it. Come in me again, please."

So Nines does. How can he not? "Come in me again,  _ please _ ," he says. Dear lord he  _ has to. _ He's gripping Gavin's hip too hard and pressing down into Gavin's shoulder, that old scar, with his forehead, and he's not biting him again, maybe, probably just licking or just moaning against his skin. It's unclear. He likes this scar. It's the first thing he sees when he's capable of seeing things again. Pale against his tan skin. A lie that only he knows the truth of.

He lets himself soften,  _ finally _ , and Gavin seems thankful for that. He's a mess, leaking and drooling and grinning, stuck to the sheets by his stomach. Nines likes the look of it. A travesty of a man, ruined beyond repair.

He presses his lips against Gavin's ear and whispers, " _ I win _ ," with every ounce of authoritative energy left in him.

And all Gavin does is hit him with one of those ill-practiced grins, all teeth and gums, something you have to see on his fucked-out face before you knew it was meant kindly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That one got a little nasty, yeah?  
> \--  
> Gavin picks up Nines-  
> Nines: *gay panic*  
> Nines picks up Gavin-  
> Gavin: *GAY; MANIC*
> 
> Nines, always: *gay; stannic*  
> Gavin, sometimes: *gay; stannic* ;)  
> (stannic: made of or containing tin)


	5. ~ Two bros chillin at a crime scene five feet apart because they are sharing a complex dynamic; using the safety net of dissociative behavior in order to express needed vulnerability since this is the only toolset the society has given them to work with ~

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You know its bad when Gavin is the emotionally aware one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lilla_Linville asked for 'a moment of crisis where the health of the heroes is in question' and I know this is not what you meant, but this is what I have presented. Unfortunately I can't be trusted to do proper drama. Yakity Sax is just playing in the background of this whole fucking fic. 
> 
> I would like to apologize to the tropes of 'Slow-burn', 'Secret Dating' and 'Hurt/Comfort' for insulting your honor by way of this fanfiction.

There is someone behind you.

Don't turn around.

You are running down the driveway of your childhood home. You are late for the bus. You are going to be late for school and it is behind you. You do not know what it is. It won't let you look. 

You can't turn around. 

It is still there.

Before you were running down the driveway you were making your lunch. You could not reach the peanut butter because you are small. It is right behind you. You can not reach. You are so little.

It is larger than you. 

Do not look at it.

Before you were making your lunch you could not find your backpack. You are running late because your backpack is missing. It watches you dig through the living room. It watches you search. 

It is also searching. 

Do not help it look.

Before you started searching you were brushing your teeth. You look at yourself in the mirror. You can not look at your own face. You can only look over your shoulder. It is not there. You feel free but you are not sure from what. You only just woke up. You turn around.

It is behind you. 

Don't look in the mirror.

Before you were brushing your teeth you were in bed. This bed is not yours. You face a wall that is not yours in a room that is not yours in a house that is not yours. There is nothing behind you. 

There is nothing behind you.

Don't turn around.

 

Gavin wakes up. This bed isn't his. His heart is already hammering in his chest. He doesn't know where he is. There's something at the foot of the bed. The room is dim, but not dark. There are small cracks of light from the window, the green glow of the digital clock. There is a shadow at the foot of the bed that is not his. He tries very hard to not make a sound.

The figure turns slowly toward him, hearing his heartbeat as it grows louder and louder. It's eyes reflect what little light there is, pale green and unblinking. It's seen him, he knows. 

This isn't his bed. Gavin shoots backward and shouts, "HOLY FUCK."

A lot of things happen in quick succession.

Gavin, in his panic to get as far away from it as possible, collides with a lamp. The lamp shatters between the wall and Gavin's arm. The lamp tries to turn on when the rest of the lights in the room click on but the bulb cracks and goes out. Gavin falls off the edge of the bed, bracing himself from the fall and shoving his arm right into the shattered ceramic covering the floor. 

Nines rushes over. "Gavin! Holy shit." He grabs something from a chair and kneels down in front of him.

"Nines? Fuck." Gavin realizes how hard he is breathing and focuses on that, taking a few deep breaths In between his words. "What the absolute fuck" breathe " is up with your fucking eyes" breathe "it's fucking inhuman."

Nines looks at him with too much patience. 

Gavin exhales. Right. Right. 

"You're bleeding a lot" He's wrapping something around Gavin's arm. 

"What the fuck were you doing looming at the end of the bed?"

"You mean standing in my own bedroom? I was going out."

Gavin looks around the room that isn't his. This is Nines' place. Right. He's never stayed at Nines' place before. Gavin looks at the broken lamp that he is sitting in the remains of. Ah, he's christened it with his bullshit, apparently. Wow. That's a lot of blood, huh?

"Why were you going out? What time is it?"

"It's 4 am, Gav. Are you- does it hurt a lot?"

Hurt? 

"Why were you going out? " Gavin asks again. 

"To-" Nines cuts himself off and starts again "I don't keep any food here. " Then he mutters, "Holy  _ shit _ , there's a lot of ceramic in your arm."

Nines was gonna get groceries for him? Like, for breakfast?

"At 4 am?"

"Gavin, this isn't important, can you move your fingers?"

"What?"

Of course he can what a dumb question. 4 am? To get groceries? You don't do that shit for-

Gavin realizes then. 

No you sure don't. 

Oh no.

"Gavin? Gav? Hey, stay with me." Nines snaps his fingers a few times.

Gavin doesn't do the emotional labor in a relationship. He knows he doesn't. He should. He knows that too. It's kind of cathartic being aware of how fucked your attitude is and refusing to fix it and pissing all your therapists off. And boyfriends too. Not that Gavin had ever conflated those two things.

Nines though. He  _ really  _ doesn't know how to handle himself. He doesn't have the experience to put up his walls or lash back at Gavin because he doesn't have even a year of experience in living, in emotional lifting. He's so blatantly - He didn't even  _ lie _ . Groceries? At 4 am? You can't just say that to a man.

He looks at his arm. Nines has wrapped it with a towel - he's so sweet. The towel is turning very red. He shattered a lamp. His stupid boyfriend's eyes are a terror. Human eyes don't reflect light. Robot eyes do apparently. Cats eyes do too. That's the rest of his life now? That's a lot of blood. Four cats now. Gavin laughs.

Gavin has to be the emotionally mature one out of sheer necessity. He literally can't do his usual shit because this stupid robot's just going to meet him with pure sincerity because he doesn't know any better. It's not gonna fall apart is it? It's gonna shatter and get all stuck in his arm. Gavin hates overwrought metaphors.

Fuck.

No one goes out at 4 am for groceries unless they are fucked, completely.

He has to face facts. That idea that Nines feels that way... It's making his head spin. The floor drops out from under him and his gut ties all up. This can't be .... It.

Gavin opens his mouth. He doesn't know what to say but he's realized something so important.

He looks at Nines. 

_ You love me, idiot. _

"Oh fuck babe I super-duper need stitches."

And Gavin passes out.

\--

"I phukkin hate hospitals." 

Gavin loves hospitals. 

Gavin hates the little individual rooms and the waiting and the way everyone you know dotes on you juxtaposed with the way the staff could not give less of a fuck about you because if you're not in an emergency situation they have more important things to think about and if you are in an emergency situation they need to focus on the medical shit and not doting.

But, aside from all that, hospitals are absolutely full of people dealing with a-typical crisis shit and that is just so very interesting to watch. The ER waiting room is wild. Showing up at 5 AM even more so. 

Nines does not look like he likes hospitals. 

Gavin has never seen Nines look nauseous before. It's kind of way more interesting than the family over in the corner using their waiting room time as an opportunity to drag out events from 10 years ago that no one has forgiven anyone else for. 

"You can go." He offers. 

"I'm fine."

"Awwww. No. You are not."

"Fuck off."

Gavin grins at the floor and pretends to watch the family's grandmother enter the fray over the in corner. Nines has his eyes fixed on the door when a nurse comes out to call another patient.

"You worried about me?" Gavin teases.

"They take you back into smaller rooms, right?" Nines responds, kind of. It doesn't seem like he's on the same plane of conversation.

"Yea."

"Right."

His leg is twitching a lot. 

"You know if you need to-"

"Is that thing helping?" Nines points at the IV stand that Gavin has wheeled up next to him. 

"Uh, yea. Kind of why I'm conscious."

"Are they going to put more tubes in you?"

"I don't think so."

"Why are we back out here if you got that?"

"I do still need the stitches."

Nines frowns. "I don't like it."

"Yea I can tell." 

Nines starts nodding, first at the floor then off towards the far wall. Gavin lets the conversation fall away externally, but he's trying really hard to piece together this reaction. It's not blood, Nines sees a lot of blood and hasn't done this before. It's not the worry. Nines worried looks like Nines angry. Nines nervous looks like Nines worried. Nines fearful looks like Nines worried. He's pretty much just got the two expressions, angry and focused, and Nines focused also looks like Nines angry.

This is Nines' new custom emotion; 'Nines-has-noticed-tubes.'

"Okay. Right. Okay."

"Okay," Gavin agrees.

"You're an adult."

"Sort of," Gavin says it with a grin but Nines is clearly not listening.

"You are gonna be waiting here for who knows how-"

"Gavin Reed?" a nurse calls him in, finally.

Nines stands up before she's halfway through saying 'Gavin' "I have to go to work."

Gavin suppresses a laugh. "Sure."

"You will be fine." It sounds like a command.

"Yep." Gavin says, but Nines is already walking off. 

\--

Luckily stitches are pretty simple and the blood loss looked worse than it was. Gavin's got a lot of blood in him.

By the time he's out and in an auto-taxi the sun is good and up. He stops for a coffee while he waits for his pain medicine prescription to be filled and grabs some greasy breakfast sandwich that's been sitting out all morning. Idly, he wonders what Nines would have picked up at the store. He wonders if that'll be something he figures out. Maybe. That's weird.

He burns his tongue on the too-hot coffee. 

He never did text Jeffery to say he was gonna be late, so he might get an earful. He might not. Bit of a crapshoot if the caseload is strenuous or not. He walks into the station just as Ben in on his way over to the garage.

"Case?" Gavin asks.

"Yea, heading over to a scene since the Lieutenant can't go."

"Hank can't?"

"Conflict of interest."

Gavin could go into the office. His tracking algorithm probably ran over night, might still be running. He could show Nines that there's no more tubes in him. That might be good. Or bad. Probably good. It's not clear. Tina's up there and she will see he got injured and flip her shit. That'll be nice in an attention having kind of way. Nines was gonna get him breakfast. It pops into his head out of nowhere. It's followed by  _ 'run'  _

Nines is over in the bullpen. 

Or

Ben's off to a scene because of a 'conflict of interest'.

"Need a partner for the day?" Gavin offers, already out the door on his heels.

"Yea sure, what happened to you?"

"I got stabbed in a bar fight."

"You did not." Ben laughs and starts up the squad car.

\--

The conflict of interest is present at the scene. Gavin takes his time helping Ben and getting caught up on the details of the case. When it comes time to discuss with the android cases consultant, Gavin volunteers. Ben raises an eyebrow and Gavin looks just as surprised, but Ben waves him on without a word.

Connor is surveying the scene from a little ways away from the DPD group, alone, awkward as ever.

"What happened?" He asks, gesturing at Gavin's arm before Gavin has a chance to start with work.

"Always had it."

Connor levels him with a look. It's eerily familiar. Gavin is fully horrified.

"New tattoo."

"Then it would be covered in plastic and also you couldn't have gotten a full sleeve tattoo in the span between the bar and now."

"Shut it in a car door."

" _ Okay _ ." Connor admits defeat with a little eye roll and starts in on the details of the case in his observation. He's not with the DPD anymore but that doesn't really stop him from going over police procedure. Gavin doesn't have to say much, just sip his coffee and listen. 

After Connor has verbally unloaded everything there is to unload about work Gavin nods. He waits in silence for a moment and then says, "We're cool, right?" If he's honest with himself it's been bugging him lately. Gavin doesn't like being honest with himself. He  _ does  _ do it, but he doesn't  _ like it. _

Connor looks at him, face neutral and too still, but led going haywire. It takes him a few seconds to come up with; "You're fucking my brother aren't you?"

Gavin winces, small at first but he holds it in a caricature of itself for apologetic effect. "God it's creepy when you figure shit out like that. He didn't want you to know."

"Yes that makes sense."

" _ Thanks _ ."

"You're okay with that?"

"What?"

"Him not wanting anyone to know."

Gavin levels a look at him, "Have you met me?" Which, interestingly, means both yes and no.

It also makes Connor laugh which is a nice change. Gavin can work with this. It's better now that Connor doesn't have the personality of a corpse. Or like. A machine.

"You are very self aware." Says a sentient machine to a human man, with a hint of surprise in his tone.

"I know, I'm the best. I got that whole thing where if you're so unabashedly sincere it doubles back around to sarcastic."

"My sincerity never seems to double back around."

"Because you're out here looking like that."

Connor looks offended, "hey."

"Just say it more pissed off, fuck up your eyebrows, be louder and make  _ no  _ eye contact. It's super easy, 'I still feel like an asshole for last year, dude, I don't know how to fix that and move on.' You know? Then it sounds fake as fuck."

"Okay." Connor can look really pissed off when he wants to, it's like flicking a switch "'I'm worried that Nines is repressing a lot of his feelings and while I am happy he is trying to form social relationships I worry that his choice of partner is only serving to further repress his trauma.'"

"You gotta say 'bro' or 'dude' at the end."

"Bro"

"That's super hurtful, dude. I'm trying really hard to be a cooler guy but I got my own trauma to repress and I'm angry that I gotta come to terms with that shit instead."

"That makes me feel both better and worse, homie."

"Don't say homie."

"Sorry. It sounds like you've got several facades of being self aware going but having your own trauma to repress doesn't excuse you from anything, bro."

"You're right, totally, I'm gonna do better."

"Dude." Connor corrects.

"Dude. It's cool, you suck at this. Whatever. Never make me do this again." Gavin sips his coffee and looks over the grisly murder scene.

Connor does this thing, you know, where he falls into a  _ righteously comfortable  _ silence. He's just working. He's just fine standing here. He's perfectly okay to be silent and let whatever shit is in the air hang there, forever. It pisses Gavin off so much. Like  _ he's  _ so well adjusted.

"So murder's gettin' automated now too, eh? Puttin' everyone out of business." Is what Gavin says. And then he cringes at himself and shuts his eyes. 

"There is no definitive proof this was committed by an android." Connor responds in that clean clipped way that Gavin knows means he agrees with Gavin's assessment but not his tactics. Lots of people talk to Gavin that way. 

_ Okay. we are doing emotional growth today. Fuck you. I'm gonna be cool as fucking shit and then you'll feel like a complete asshole for being so  _ maliciously  _ chill, you dick. _

"So. I know homicide doesn't use much scripting but, just for, like, you know, transparency with the consultant, Ben and I are going with the, uh, automated angle."

"Your point being?"

"I'll send over my scripting profile once it's done, probably tomorrow morning. They're not, er. Well traditionally homicide tended to not need automated tracking but you know the times they are a-changin'"

"I don't need your script I am in fact a state of the art-"

"-Yea, bud, I know your shits out of date don't come at me with that."

"Exactly how do you know-"

"-Because this is pretty obviously linked to my trafficking case and I just updated the script last week. Do you need me to convert it to CLOIE for you?"

Connor looks at him sideways. "What? Did you work for Cyberlife?"

"No, but their shit is just FrAI with some integrated libraries and some bullshit proprietary syntax, right? We use FrAI in office."

"What? We do? I mean, you do?"

"Well not over in homicide since there isn't much automation there, well. Wasn't." Gavin gestures to the crime scene. _ Probably should train up some of the homicide detectives.  _ "But yea, I write FrAI scripts for like, fraud and trafficking and domestic terrorism rings and shit like that."

"Oh." Connor claps his hands together. "Technically it's all DevAI now. Do you know it?"

Gavin shrugs and shakes his head.

Connor positively lights up. As a metaphor for his expression and also, literally, on his temple. "It's CLOIE but syntax is  _ optional!" _

"How the fuck is syntax optional?"

Connor shrugs. "Explain chemical life and intelligence to me."

"Yea alright, fair point."

\--

Gavin manages to talk Ben into lunch before they head back into the office, but head back in they do. 

Tina spots him from across the floor of the DPD. She goes to wave, and then clearly spots the bandages on Gavin's arm. She leaps off the desk she was sitting on and rushes over.

"What happened?"

Gavin holds out his arm when she reaches out, "Oh well I -"

"Did that fucker from the bar attack you?"

"Wh-" Gavin scrambles for a second. Oh, this looks way worse than he thought, doesn't it? Tina doesn't know he bailed on that. "No, no, nothing like that. I didn't even stay."

"Gavin." Tina fixed him with a critical gaze. 

"I didn't. He didn't do this. I bailed on that guy."

"Then what did you do?"

Nines looks over from his desk, keying in on the conversation and catching Gavin's eye. 

"I dropped my house keys down a sewer grate on my way home."

Tina levels a look of incredulity at him. "You got this reaching into a sewer? What was in the sewer that would cut you? I can't believe they didn't keep you at the hospital to watch for an infection."

"No. It wasn't the sewer. I just. I didn't have my keys when I got home. I had to you know… climb up the fire escape and break a window to get in, I did a bad job of it."

Tina squints at him, irritated disbelief written on her face. "What?"

Gavin shrugs.

"Why didn't you ask your landlord for a spare key? Doesn't she live on the first floor?"

"She was out, no answer."

"I have a spare key."

"Yea I was drunk and had to piss, get off my back." Gavin turns away and toward his desk. 

"Are you okay, though?"

"Yea T, I'm fine."

"Okay." she pauses a moment, "You're sure it wasn't... If you're lying because you don't want me to feel bad for talking you into it-"

"T, stop. It wasn't that guy. Chill."

"How did you drive in without your keys?"

"I had a spare. Back off. We still on for games after work?"

Tina fixes him with a stare. She waits for a beat before relenting. "Yea."

\--

Gavin rushes up from the parking garage with Nines trailing behind him. He's on the lookout for a sewer that would be reasonably placed between where an Auto Taxi would drop him off and the entrance to his apartment complex. 

He finds one and with no hesitation drops his keys down it, already turning on his heels to get to the building entrance.

"Gav- what the fuck?"

"Okay babe, we gotta get the house all fucked up before Tina gets here hurry up." He waves at Nines who doesn't seem to appreciate there is a deadline upon them.

"Gavin."

"Niner we gotta make this look convincing, it's  _ Tina _ . Those keys are dead to me."

"How are we going to get into your place?"

"I had a spare in my desk at work, we're fine."

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

Instead of answering Gavin pushes Nines inside frantically and jogs over to the elevator. 

\--

When they reach Gavin's apartment he makes a beeline for the window next to the fire escape. He pulls his hand back and -

"Gavin! Stop!"

\- slams the fist of his injured arm right into the window. 

" **_FUCK_ ** "

"Gavin."

"Seriously not now she's -" 

"Gavin you are panicking. You need to think more clearly about your prob- DON'T JUST PUNCH IT AGAIN." Nines reaches for it too late when Gavin's other fist collides with the window pane, shattering nothing but Gavin's pride.

" _ Fuck _ dude,  **PHUCK** " Gavin shakes out his hand and he whips around to face Nines **.**

_ "Stop it." _

"Fuck off! What do you want me to do exactly? If we don't fuck it up in here. Tina's gonna find out. You're the one who wants it to be a big goddamn secret-"

"Gavin. Shut up. One; You need to punch it  _ in  _ from the  _ outside  _ and Two; I'll do it."

With that Nines climbs out the window, shuts it behind him, and shoves his whole fist through the solid glass. 

Gavin stares at him while he opens the shattered window and climbs back in. He brushes a bit of glass off his sleeve. "Get some cardboard. What are we going to do about the lack of blood at the scene?"

"I can bleed on it when I change my bandage. I think I tore it open when I punched the window."

Nines claps his fist into his open palm, "Good use of resources." 

"Get the cats out of here would you?"

"Yea, on it."

Gavin calls upon his years of experience as a detective, seeing blood and break-ins, to bleed his own blood on his own floor so that his best friend will think he is one kind of a dumbass instead of a different kind. 

By the time Nines comes back from locking the cats in the bedroom he's done a pretty good job.

"Did you pop a stitch?"

"No I think I'm fine."

"Okay good."

"Look believable?"

"I think it matches your asinine story to the best of our ability." 

"Dope. Help me pretend I cleaned it up while drunk."

 

Ten minutes later they have some cardboard duct taped to the window and the glass cleaned up and in the trash. There is a knock on the door, Gavin's eyes catch Nines. He says, "oh shit I think it's the cops."

Tina, naturally, lets herself in regardless of the knock. She is mid conversation "-okay I have been thinking about it and they must have installed this window really bad if you can just drunkenly punch through it. That's not a thing people can just do."

Nines is standing by the window, eyes fixed on it with a deep scowl on his face. 

"Uh." Gavin offers.

"I think you should really look into a negligence claim from the landlady or even whoever installed the window."

"Tina it's not a big deal."

"I mean. It IS a big deal. Or do you suddenly not know the kind of shit we see at work all the time?" 

"I'm not suing my landlady for negligence-"

"-It was definitely installed wrong or something. People can't punch through glass like this."

"Can we just drop it?"

"No!"

"Ughhhhh," Gavin rolled his eyes at the ceiling. 

"I can't believe you are not taking this seriously? Do you remember when you arrested that psychopath - "

"-If someone wanted to kill me for arresting them they can shoot out -"

"- You had to move the first time that he -"

" -the glass or whatever, not being able to punch it won't do- "

" - and you haven't even gotten it fixed?! It's just cardboard -"

"- I had to go to work!"

"-you can take a day off to fix a window and go to the fucking hospital Gavin."

They bicker like this as Tina makes her way over to the window. Gavin wasn't expecting her to be quite this relentlessly focused and no matter how good he and Nines might be at faking a break in it was a rush job and he will need to change the subject fast. 

"Can you just  _ chill  _ please?" Gavin shouts at her.

"No! Gavin you are going to take your personal safety seriously for once in your life if I have to-"

"You are really acting like your mother right now."

Nines' head snaps over to Gavin much faster than Tina is able to round on him. But not a whole lot faster. They both look floored.

"What the  _ fuck  _ did you just say to me?"

Nines mouths over her shoulder, hands in the air, _ 'why would you say that?' _

Tina turns away from Gavin and stares daggers at Nines who snaps his attention down to hers. "Nines you're on my side here, right? He always does this-"

Which gives Gavin the chance to silently reply  _ 'She's not talking about the window anymore is she?'  _  with a big shrug.

Tina whips back to Gavin and prods his chest with her index finger "You always do this when I worry, not everything has to be a fight just because I give a shit."

Nines silently says, over her head  _ 'You're making everything worse!' _

Tina spins back to Nines "This is what I was saying this morning. This is a prime example. He didn't call me for help because I was trying to get him to move the fuck on-" 

Gavin mouths,  _ 'Shut up. This is your fault.' _

"-and he hates it when anyone looks out for him well I am  _ sorry  _ if -"

Nines gives Gavin a look, as if to say  _ 'how is this my fault?' _ which could easily be interpreted as him agreeing with Tina about Gavin's stubbornness, so she takes it that way.

_ 'If I had my way I'd just tell her the truth,' _ Gavin smacks his bandage to make his point which, naturally, hurts and he curses.

Nines blinks, processing. Yellow.

"Are you listening to me? Nines?" Tina smacks him in the shoulder and he snaps back to awareness.

"I. I have… completed... my analysis of the window damage and reconstructed the cause." 

"You did? And?"

"There was. A. Micro-fissure. In the glass that was exasperated over time due to changes in temperature over the winter. It is unlikely that there was criminal negligence during installation. I suspect Gavin simply opened his window too hard, causing the initial micro-fissure and was able to take advantage of the structural flaw to break the glass last night. " 

Tina lets out a big sigh. "Okay. You're sure?"

"Absolutely positive."

She turned back to Gavin. Over he shoulder Nines was staring off into the middle distance.

"You really punched the window in?"

"Yes."

She hesitates. "Okay. It just. Seemed like a lie. As long as it's not-"

Gavin pulls her into a big hug, "Thanks for worrying about me Teaberry."

"Don't fucking call me that."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FrAI Script - Free Artificial Intelligence Script  
> CLOIE - CyberLife Operative Intelligence Engine  
> DevAI - Deviated Automated Intelligence  
> \--  
> Fact of the day: When little Gavin Reed played Undertale and helped the two bro-knights work through their social fears to admit their feelings for one another for the first time he cried for a solid ten minutes afterward and didn't understand why at the time.  
> \--  
> Gavin, chapters 1-4: Preeeeeetty sure this is lust.  
> Audience: You love him, idiot!  
> Gavin, chapter 5: Oh fuck I'm in love  
> Audience: THAT'S JUST BLOOD LOSS.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a lot less planned out than my other ones have been, I have like a scant few paragraphs of upcoming parts. My other works have been a lot more planned. If you want me to post more leave me some comments and feel free to request stuff or point out things you liked that you'd like me to expand on.
> 
> If you want to contact me (please):  
> tumblr; [@dustatdusk](http://dustatdusk.tumblr.com/)  
> twitter; [@DustinLoam](https://twitter.com/DustinLoam) \- I post links to my original work here


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